


'cus i'm icy, wifey

by mockturtletale



Category: K-pop, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempt at Humor, Canon Compliant, Dirty Talk, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Epic Love, Feelings, Humor, Hyung Kink, Jeon Jungkook Needs a Hug, Jeon Jungkook is a Brat, Jeon Jungkook is a Little Shit, Kim Seokjin | Jin Despairs, Kim Seokjin | Jin is a Good Hyung, Lust, M/M, Miscommunication, Multi, Mutual Pining, Pining, Power Dynamics, Sexting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:21:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 71,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22793161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockturtletale/pseuds/mockturtletale
Summary: there are a lot of things that jungkook really, really likes about seokjin.his absolute preference for jungkook and deference to his wants, wishes and whims chief among them.
Relationships: Jeon Jungkook/Kim Seokjin | Jin
Comments: 310
Kudos: 1249
Collections: BBBFest Debut Round: The Bittersweet Option





	1. lowkey lowkey lowkey lowkey

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea what to even put here. 
> 
> this story began as a tiny fill idea for the BBB fest prompt: 'no wait come back please smother me' and now it is the longest piece of writing i've ever produced. i find myself not wanting to leave this one, yet, because it's become so special to me and part of me wants to dig my heels in and stay here forever. 
> 
> alas, my good friend and the best girl steph keeps telling me i have to finish and post this, so here we are. it's entirely thanks to her that this story ever got this far or got completed at all, tbqh. she is heaven sent and solely responsible for any good thing i ever produce. 
> 
> i made a playlist that i listened to a lot while i was writing this. all the songs on there say something that i think either jungkook or seokjin or both of them felt at times during this story, so i'd be delighted if you wanted to give it a listen: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6xb55So8nv2zELFo3zg96O?si=WZWt6gk8RjWkMEcR7l58DA
> 
> i'd also love to know what you thought, if you decide to read this but please be gentle with me because this one is precious to me. 
> 
> thank you for reading! ♥ 
> 
> please come befriend me on twitter @hwifighting or check out my twitfic account @mockturtletale ♥ ♥

[ ](https://ibb.co/pyGMc0Z)

[ ](https://ibb.co/XyP6pTL)

“the baby gay has landed,” taehyung announces when jungkook is the last of them to come through the door, pushing at it once he’s inside to make sure it closed and locked behind him. taehyung is sitting on the step to take his shoes off, untying the laces and then producing an honest to god soft cloth from his jacket pocket to dust them off before he places them on the shelf, lining the heels up perfectly. 

jungkook is about to end this man’s entire career, his whole life maybe, because the _audacity_ , especially given the choices he has previously and is currently making, but then seokjin appears around the corner, already showered and changed, his hair still wet and his face steam-blushed. jungkook must have caught the slow car, today, considering they’d all left the broadcasting station at the same time. 

“hello, stranger,” seokjin says and when he smiles, his whole face smooths out. it makes jungkook think of how the tide pulls away from the shore and leaves a clean sheet of shining sand in its wake. it feels like seeing something in the state it was born to be. natural perfection. 

“hey,” jungkook says back, kicking his shoes off without looking to see where they land and then ‘accidentally’ kicking taehyung in passing as he steps over him. “hey, hyung,” he says and hopes he’s the only one who hears the pause in the middle, the place where jungkook missed a step because ‘hyung’ is what he’s supposed to call seokjin, but it’s never the first word that springs to mind, never even the third or fourth. 

“welcome home, are you hungry?” seokjin turns away, heads off in the direction of the kitchen without waiting for an answer, not bothering to check to see if jungkook is following. 

“i eat too, hyung,” taehyung is huffy, shuffling along on socked feet at jungkook’s shoulder like his well dressed but disgruntled shadow. 

once seated at the table with taehyung next to him even though literally nobody invited him, jungkook eats from the chopsticks seokjin holds up to his mouth and closes his eyes, hums with how delicious it is. 

as soon as seokjin turns his back, jungkook sticks his tongue out at taehyung, half chewed food and all and taehyung tries to kick him under the table, but it’s been literal years since anyone caught jungkook slipping, so get wrecked taehyung. 

“you both sicken me,” taehyung says, stealing a bite from jungkook’s plate as he gets up to leave and it’s only because jungkook is too tired to get into a full wrestling match on the kitchen floor (again, today) that he doesn’t do anything about it. 

“you’re just jealous of our love,” seokjin says, mild and easy, automatic even and jungkook just shrugs. 

“i would say ‘sucks to not be hyung’s favourite,’ but honestly i have no idea what that’s like.” 

and for once, jungkook isn’t even being smug. 

empirically speaking, he’s simply telling the truth. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

seokjin has really big hands. 

watching him chop vegetables speedily and precisely with a very large and incredibly sharp weapon has been known to challenge sexualities. jungkook has himself witnessed fans fainting on sight when seokjin was reckless enough to wave right at them, up close and personal. it’s understandable. jungkook isn’t judgemental. 

he’s not even being judgemental right now, even though it feels like every brain cell he has is trying to throb its way out of his skull via the hole seokjin has just finger flicked through it. 

he’s crying a little bit, stupid tear ducts and stupid automatic biological functions, jungkook’s gonna be all over hacking that shit as soon as he can see again, just you wait. he might be bleeding, actually and it wouldn’t even be the first time this has happened but when jungkook squints real hard and tries to look up inside his own brain, he sees that seokjin has pressed a damp cloth to his forehead. 

“oh, 'guk, hyung is so sorry,” he says, cradling jungkook’s head to his chest with one very careful hand, holding the cloth gently against jungkook’s face with its slightly trembling counterpart. 

“eh, s’fine,” jungkook isn’t one to pass up an opportunity to exaggerate his woes, once they’re not in any way related to his work and also likely to garner him sympathy, preferably in the form of cuddles and or food. but honestly, whining seems like it would take a lot of energy that he could otherwise direct to thoroughly enjoying being allowed to press his cheek to seokjin’s broad chest, so warm and soft even through his light tshirt. 

“i forgot. i wasn’t thinking, it was just automatic and i didn’t remember that it was _you_.” 

jungkook has always known that his hyungs go easy on him, even with silly little punishments and pranks, but he’ll never get tired of hearing them admit it. that’s something special. something more than simply special when it’s coming from seokjin. 

“what if you bruise, oh my god,” seokjin is moving, leaning over to reach for something on his desk but he keeps his hand in jungkook’s hair, keeps him where he is and moves him with him. jungkook isn’t worried. he closes his eyes and tries not to smile. 

that night, jungkook gets tucked into bed with an RJ bandaid taking pride of place in the very center of his forehead, right over his perfectly unblemished skin but more importantly - under the kisses seokjin keeps dropping there, all day long. 

the next day, when the makeup noonas gripe at him to take it off, he peels it away carefully and sticks it to the back of his phone. 

“that’s disgusting, there’s so many germs on that,” seokjin says as soon as he sees it. he gets up and disappears for a couple minutes, comes back with a small pack of disinfectant wipes and carefully cleans jungkook’s phone once he’s tossed the bandaid in the trash. 

later that afternoon, jungkook picks his phone up and finds a brand new RJ sticker stuck there. it’s one of the prototypes they’d been sent, a version where RJ is blowing a hand kiss. 

when jimin sees it, he throws a hissy fit. he’d begged seokjin for one for weeks and seokjin had shot him down constantly but apologetically, explaining that he’d only gotten one, promising he’d give jimin a full set once they were printed up. 

“i could be lying on the floor bleeding to death and hyung would step over me to ask you if you needed anything.” jimin’s exaggerating considerably, but jungkook makes no attempt to stop or correct him. 

“just fave things, i guess,” he says, shrugging and going to sit next to seokjin, who is looking at something on his own phone. something important, probably, because his fingers are white-knuckled around it. 

“you good, hyung?” jungkook asks and seokjin doesn’t look up at him, doesn’t look up at all. 

“mind your own business, you little germ goblin,” he says, but jungkook doesn’t take offense. 

even when seokjin is cursing jungkook out or doing everything within his power to physically fight him without ever even almost hurting him, he’s usually doing it with heart eyes. 

that’s always been the case, from the first time seokjin challenged him to a thumb war up until this morning, when seokjin had challenged jungkook to hand to hand combat after jungkook refused to laugh at his terrible joke, so it hasn’t been hard for jungkook to become fluent in seokjin’s love language. 

seokjin drops another kiss on jungkook’s bare forehead that night and jungkook is still smiling when he eventually falls asleep. 

seokjin makes much more sense to him than english does.

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“yah, pass me the remote,” jungkook says, poking hoseok in the ribs with his toes, purely a motivational gesture, you understand. 

“.........‘yah’?” hoseok asks, incredulous, making no move to do as jungkook has asked. he sucks. 

“jin, get me the remote,” jungkook tries instead and seokjin actually gets up from his seat, farther from the coffee table than jungkook’s, to pick up the remote control and drop it into jungkook’s lap. 

hoseok looks absolutely astonished. 

“i am absolutely astonished. i can’t believe what i just witnessed,” he says, staring between seokjin and jungkook. 

jungkook grins. 

seokjin gets up again, heads in the direction of the kitchen. 

“shut up, i was getting up anyway,” he snaps, walking swiftly and not looking back. 

when he returns a few moments later with hot tea for himself and a mug for jungkook too, hoseok gets up and leaves the room in protest. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

when the director finally calls for them, seokjin has jungkook in a headlock. 

they’d been standing around, waiting for ages, bored out of their minds and as usual one thing had lead to another until seokjin was skipping around, jumping from one foot to the other as jungkook tried - playfully, cutely - to sweep his feet out from beneath him. 

it’s all fun and games, business as usual with them and jungkook isn’t surprised when the rest of the group give them a wide berth, sometimes shout encouragement or criticism from the far off sidelines but make no move to get involved. 

“they’re energetic, huh?” someone says when they’re all touched up and straightened out and filing into frame. 

“i don’t know how jin-hyung does it, but he’s committed to keeping the maknae fed and exercised, it’s a relief he’s with us,” namjoon says in reply and lots of people laugh. 

jungkook rolls his eyes when only seokjin can see him do it and seokjin smiles that tiny, hidden smile that somehow lights his whole face up even more than his ridiculous grins do. 

seokjin and jungkook aren’t anything like a pet and master. 

jungkook and seokjin are fucking _goals_ and everyone else is just jealous because they’ll never be on their level. 

sucks for them, but jungkook can’t relate. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

there are a lot of things that jungkook really, really likes about seokjin. 

his absolute preference for jungkook and deference to his wants, wishes and whims chief among them. 

except for how that’s narrowly beaten out by this one other thing he does. 

this one thing about him that makes jungkook want to grab him and choke the life out of him, it’s so fucking cute. 

they’ve been out working for coming up on sixty hours now and they’d tried to squeeze naps in whenever and however they could, but they still trail into the apartment like a troupe of vegan zombies, leaning on one another as they take off their shoes and hang up their coats, helping each other up off the floor when they sink there and ask for death; plead for this one final mercy. 

showering is bullshit honestly. standing up straight and being conscious is the absolute fucking worst and jungkook’s whole body is pulsing strangely; maybe in protest, maybe in exhaustion, maybe (hopefully) because he’s about to evolve, by the time he climbs into bed. 

his eyes are already closed when seokjin comes in and jungkook doesn’t even have the energy to move over for him. he knows seokjin will just move him if he wants to, but though he listens for that pause of contemplation, it does not come. 

seokjin climbs up onto the bed, his knees making the mattress dip down by jungkook’s feet and then rock gently from side to side as he knee walks up along either side of jungkook’s legs until he lowers himself to lie down directly on top of jungkook. he puts his forehead on the pillow, his nose and mouth pressed down into the space between jungkook’s shoulder and the sheets and jungkook’s only reaction is to wriggle his arms up from inside the covers to loop around seokjin’s waist over them, instead. 

they’re comfortable. warm and horizontal and living their best lives, honestly and jungkook is just about to drift off into blissful sleep when he hears someone at the door, realizes he never heard seokjin close it. 

because seokjin had been so tired that he’d forgotten all about the function and purpose of doors, so focused had he been on getting to jungkook and going to sleep. 

a-fucking-dorable, in jungkook’s studied and widely esteemed opinion. 

“he’ll smother him. should i wake them up?” namjoon is trying to whisper, but failing as usual and jungkook feels seokjin shake with silent laughter against his shoulder. 

“nah, they’ll be fine. they’re basically the same size. both overgrown lap dogs,” is yoongi’s contribution, must be the mutually accepted conclusion, because the door closes then. 

seokjin settles further, somehow, goes a little more boneless on top of jungkook and jungkook sighs in response; in absolute satisfaction. 

he doesn’t ask if he’s crushing jungkook or if jungkook is uncomfortable. he knows he doesn’t have to. 

jungkook tightens his arms around him, turns his face into seokjin’s hair and promptly falls asleep. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

when jungkook joined the group, he’d been teeny tiny. itty bitty, according to some sources.

seokjin had moved into the dorm not long after and he had been a bit scrawny still maybe, but huge even then. big in the shoulders, broad in the chest, beautiful in the face. 

it’s been a long time since jungkook has had to physically look up to seokjin, but that doesn’t change the fact that seokjin is always where jungkook is looking. 

namjoon leads them fiercely, brutally capable. anything they ask of him, he’ll do, but everything he ever does is for them and that makes jungkook hesitant to ask, never eager to add to his worries and burdens. 

yoongi tries to act indifferent sometimes, especially in front of the cameras and the fans, but behind closed doors he’s always been ride or die for every single one of them. he’s the one you’d call if you needed a rescue or wanted a building burned down. jungkook hasn’t needed either yet, thankfully, but it’s always nice to know he could and yoongi would handle it, no questions asked or payment required beyond some hand holding that jungkook is always down to provide, anyway. 

hoseok kind of makes jungkook’s heart hurt because he has to see him give so much of his own away. hoseok turns himself inside out for everyone, for anyone and that’s just his nature, it’s never done with an ulterior motive or for personal gain. how could it be, when he so often ends up losing something of himself? jungkook can’t change hoseok, wouldn’t want to if he could, so he stays by his side instead, protects him from whoever he needs to, even if that’s sometimes hoseok himself. 

jimin and taehyung are an entity unto themselves. same age thing aside, no one had really seen it coming when they’d met and instantly started to fuse into one being. they’re closer with jungkook than they are with the others, maybe, but never anything like what they are with one another and that’s fine, jungkook has too much on his own plate to feel left out by something as small as that. 

plus, there’s seokjin. 

it could be argued that jungkook is all the hyung’s shared project. a responsibility at first and someone to cherish and spoil thereafter. 

but for all that some days can feel like a never ending tug of war for jungkook’s time, his attention, his love, he knows that if it came down to it, seokjin could stake a claim on him. 

seokjin is his biggest hyung in so, so many ways. the very best way is how he makes jungkook feel small. safe. held. it’s jungkook’s favourite feeling, favourite way to be. 

it’s why jungkook doesn’t have to hold back so much when they’re playing or wrestling or tussling. it’s why jungkook absolutely loves it when he pretends to overpower seokjin the same way he does the rest of the hyungs and seokjin actually lets him. it’s why jungkook can still feel small around seokjin, protected and safe, but doesn’t always have to be careful with him, only touches him reverently when he wants to. when he chooses to. when he needs to. 

he’s not seokjin’s the same way taehyung is jimin’s, but he’s still seokjin’s. 

and seokjin is his. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

seokjin is his and he’s seokjin’s and it’s chill. 

it’s lit. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

except, of course, for when it is simply unbearable instead. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

a couple years back, seokjin had had something maybe sort of like an almost boyfriend. 

he had a person who he was kissing, is all jungkook really knows for sure. an ex-trainee that jungkook only met once. he’d spent a lot more time with seokjin, before jungkook joined big hit. jungkook hadn’t liked him, when they’d met. and that had been before he’d started kissing seokjin. 

it hadn’t gone on for long. a couple months at most. 

seokjin would come back to the dorms sometimes with his mouth still kiss-bitten, flushed dark, bruised and wet like they’d just kissed goodbye, like he’d drawn it out as long as he could, like he hadn’t wanted it to end, hadn’t wanted to come inside. 

no one else had ever said anything about it, so jungkook hadn’t either. 

he’s not sure who he’d have asked, anyway. 

he’s pretty sure none of the hyungs would have been able to tell him why the knowledge that seokjin wanted to kiss someone who wasn’t him made jungkook want to put his fist through something that would _hurt_. 

he’s certain no one, not even seokjin; god himself, could have explained to him why it had felt like seokjin was cheating on him when he and seokjin weren’t together. 

jungkook and seokjin weren’t together. 

never have been, weren’t now. 

but seokjin hadn’t been with anyone else since, either. he’d been asked out time and time again, right in front of jungkook even and it’s not like very many people try hard or at all to mask their naked pursuit of seokjin, but seokjin doesn’t relent anymore. not after that one time, not to jungkook’s knowledge.

jungkook’s knowledge of seokjin’s whereabouts at all times is extensive, but not absolute. 

jungkook hopes seokjin hasn’t relented. 

but if he has, jungkook wouldn’t comment on that. he couldn’t. 

they’re not together, but he’s seokjin’s and seokjin is his. 

it’s cool. it’s chill. it’s great. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

except for the part where it’s a lot like losing his mind constantly, instead. 

there’s this really fucking stupid running joke in their group where everyone will gang up on jungkook to bring up his bedroom, his bed, his apparently incredibly pathetic sleeping conditions. 

five interviews can’t go by without one of them insinuating something insulting or straight up lying about jungkook sleeping in his hyung’s beds. 

and it’s all in good fun; it’s harmless but it’s also dumb because the best lies are the ones based in truth and the truth is that jungkook doesn’t actually have a bed because he and seokjin sleep together. 

because they’ve shared a bed since jungkook - nineteen years old and two years openly gay and three years closetedly in love with seokjin - decided to stop playing himself. 

what’s actually a joke is how often jungkook says something like: 

‘sure, hyung,’  


‘yeah, okay,’  


‘hey turn that shit up,’  


‘no, i don’t think so,’  


‘cola, please,’  


‘that verse is sick,’  


‘i can do that,’  


‘pass me the detergent,’  


‘the black, please,’  


‘take a fucking shower before i gag,’  


‘wake me up in an hour,’

or whatever the fuck else happens to come out of his mouth when every single time he opens it around seokjin, what he actually means to say is this: ‘please, hyung, if you’re not busy right now, would you mind throwing me down onto our bed and fucking me through the mattress.’ 

he wakes up in the morning and untangles himself from seokjin, jerks off thinking about his shoulders in the shower, gets dressed and drags his ass to the kitchen and says ‘morning, is there more rice left?’ when what he truly means is ‘good morning, seokjin, you look especially super fucking hot today, can i maybe tempt you to bend me over this counter and rail me until one of us cries?’ 

and the thing is, jungkook is fine with the fact that that’s what he wants. all he wants, really. 

there’s been a few (hundred) times when seokjin has done or said something especially terrible, looked somehow even more ridiculously fuckable than he generally does and jungkook has slipped up, accidentally murmured his one thought, his reverant and plaintive plea for seokjin to just please “fuck _me_ ” out loud and seokjin has heard it, they’ve all heard it but seokjin just laughs, even when everyone else gives them both the strangest, weirdest looks. seokjin only ever laughs it off, makes an off key and off colour comment about being jungkook’s age and getting turned on by a nicely shaped bottle of soda or a certain shade of a colour he likes and then everything is fine because seokjin is the weird one again but jungkook’s not fine, jungkook is never fine because what he is is fucking desperate, instead. 

he didn’t freak out when he realized what his feelings meant or what they amounted to. he’s always loved seokjin with his entire heart, but one day he realized that he also wanted to love him with his whole dick and that simply means loving seokjin more, when you do the math, so jungkook never saw any reason to be confused or panicked about it. 

if he’d lived a life where he got to exist alongside kim seokjin’s shoulders, sometimes naked, sometimes snugged up around jungkook’s when they accidentally spoon in their sleep and _didn’t_ want to be under him, like permanently, then that would be cause for concern for him. 

sometimes he hears about the things other idols go through, or picks up one of namjoon’s books and accidentally gets so far into it that he actually has to finish it even though he’s just realized that it’s namjoon’s book and as such about to either change the way he sees life itself or make him feel like he’s just shit his own heart out and when that happens - when jungkook is confronted with the way his reality might have shaken out in any other group, in any other time, in this very time but in any other family, in his own city - jungkook quakes. he has to sit very quietly by himself somewhere not too bright and not too close to other people and sometimes cry in frustration, out of anger, or sometimes just because he’s so sad. 

jungkook loves the family he was born into. they gave him life, they give him love. 

but the family jungkook chose for himself gave him the whole world. they showed him how to love and be loved. 

and because of how they’ve guided him, shaped him and shown him how to be himself, it hadn’t been easy, but it certainly hadn’t been difficult when he’d decided to stop letting them assume he was heterosexual. they’d always used vague terms, left plenty of room for other words, space for interpretation or correction and eventually jungkook had just stepped up into the place they’d already carved out for him and said one day “girls are great, 10/10 would befriend, but i like boys.” 

there’d been a pretty significant pause, maybe in recognition of the weight of the moment or maybe because it had been 6am and they’d been up all night and also in the middle of a dance practice that jungkook had interrupted to make this announcement, apropos of literally nothing. 

“gay,” he’d said, in case he needed to make it clearer. he’d thought it was dumb that he had to say it at all, honestly, why didn’t the hets have to make an announcement, was his question, but for the sake of clarity and all that jazz, “super gay,” he’d stressed, pointing both thumbs at himself as they’d all continued to stare. but then namjoon had nodded and said “cool” and jimin and taehyung had simultaneously chorused “same!” and hoseok had laughed at them and pointed across the studio at jungkook and said “i fucking love you jeon jungkook” and that was that, really. jungkook had grinned so hard his face hurts even when he thinks back to that moment, shouted “let’s get it” and then they’d all been back at work, everything exactly as it was before, but a little bit better maybe, in some ways. 

seokjin hadn’t said anything, but then, he hadn’t really needed to. he’d dated a guy before and they all knew that, he made no secret of it. he’d mentioned a high school boyfriend too, though jungkook didn’t think that significant enough to warrant said mention. what seokjin did before he met jungkook isn’t important or interesting to him like, at all. maybe seokjin liked girls too, maybe he just liked people, but jungkook wouldn’t know because it’s been years since seokjin mentioned an interest in anyone. 

and call him stupid - only, don’t, because that would hurt his feelings - but jungkook had kind of taken that as indication that maybe seokjin liked him. liked him back. 

literally everything jungkook asks for, seokjin gives him. anything jungkook says, seokjin does. he treats him different, treats him like he’s special and that’s what a crush is, right? having that one person that’s set aside from everyone else, for you. 

for years now, jungkook has been perfectly content to sail through life knowing that whatever he is to seokjin, it’s something that no one else is and that’s always felt promising to him. always made him excited for the climax they have to be building towards, right? 

but it has been years now. 

and things just stay the same. 

jungkook isn’t in any way dissatisfied with how that is, but he’s also got a lot of suggestions for how they could improve on these matters. he’s got thoughts. he’s had dreams. he could illustrate some choice concepts, if he thought that would make seokjin understand. 

but he doesn’t think even nsfw fan art would make seokjin actually address what’s happening, or - not - between them. 

for a long time, jungkook assumed seokjin was waiting.

waiting for jungkook to be a little bit older, waiting for their careers to be a little bit more secure, waiting for their lives to get a little bit less hectic, waiting for whatever milestone he’d decided on as the one change that would let him know that it was time, now. 

from time to time it occurred to jungkook that maybe he was hoping for too much; dreaming too big. expecting everything without cause, without reason. because jungkook generally tends to get everything he wants, whether that’s because he works himself to the bone for it, or because he’s just that lucky sometimes. but seokjin is bigger than luck. seokjin is so much more than something jungkook could simply earn. 

doubt creeps up on jungkook like vines on a trellis, slow and strangling when jungkook gets too busy, too distracted or too sure to ward it off. 

but seokjin chases it away with the way he smiles at jungkook differently to how he smiles at everyone else. seokjin reassures worries jungkook can’t even voice just by being always by his side. 

seokjin loves jungkook and that’s clear. 

seokin loves jungkook and likes him too, favours him over literally everyone else sometimes so was it really a reach to assume that he’d be into jungkook romantically too? jungkook certainly didn’t think so. 

and so jungkook was content to wait. in the meantime, he’d had seokjin in his bed every single night. he’d had seokjin actually for reals taking his own shirt off his back to give it to jungkook, one time. he’d had every assurance he needed that no matter what happened, he _had_ seokjin. 

and so even though he hadn’t known what they were waiting for, exactly, he’d trusted that it was important, if it mattered to seokjin. 

in the day to day, on the small stuff, seokjin let jungkook act like he was in charge and jungkook loved that, jungkook took that permission and ran the fuck amok. 

but when it came to the big things, the serious parts, that was all seokjin and always had been. 

jungkook trusts seokjin with everything. even this, though it’s so important to him that it usually has him either so fucking hype for the rest of his life that he can’t wait, doesn’t want to wait, can’t sit still, has the fucking emotional zoomies and needs to run around until he falls down or finds him so humbled by the honour of getting to feel this way at all, so awed by seokjin and the fact that it’s jungkook that he’s chosen to be next to, that he doesn’t know what to do with himself at all. 

who the fuck gets picked by kim seokjin and knows how to conduct themselves? not jungkook. 

with seokjin by his side, jungkook feels like a boy king. he feels like a young prince; too powerful by far and thoroughly uncaring about that all at once. 

because maybe jungkook doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, but seokjin always does and jungkook trusts seokjin completely. 

and so jungkook had waited. 

people try to date seokjin and he politely, sweetly turns them down. 

people try to date jungkook and jungkook gets a little baffled by the mere concept of having an interest in someone who isn’t seokjin. 

they’re both alone and work to stay that way. 

but they’re alone together, side by side. 

and that had felt like the precursor to something wonderful. 

wonderful was worth waiting for. seokjin was worth waiting for. 

so jungkook had waited. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“hey so, you know how jin-hyung, like …” jungkook trails off, because trying to put the sum of everything he’s trying to say into dumb out-loud words is like, a struggle. the struggle, honestly. 

taehyung just looks at him. and this was maybe a bad time to choose to have this conversation because most of the time taehyung is his favourite of all the people that aren’t seokjin but it’s two in the morning and jungkook had climbed into taehyung’s bed and then pulled his hair until he woke up and taehyung is generally love on legs; tata is a purely accurate representation of what he actually looks like, but right now he’s looking at jungkook like he’s trying to figure out what he has to hand that he could use as a weapon and jungkook, accordingly, is scared. 

this would probably be a good time to get to the fucking point and then get the fuck out. 

“okay. do you think jin-hyung gives me everything i want and does everything i say because he loves me or because he _loves_ me?” jungkook squints into the darkness, not entirely satisfied with the execution but pretty sure he nailed the landing, at least. “yeah. is it because he’s a good person or is it because he wants to like. do me?” 

taehyung’s facial expression doesn’t change at all. it’s terrifying, but jungkook stands his ground. he needs answers. 

“i cannot believe we’re talking about this in the middle of the night in the year of our lord taeyeon 2019,” jimin says, sitting up from behind taehyung, where jungkook hadn’t even seen him. 

“do you get smaller at night?” jungkook asks, momentarily distracted from his dilemma, because jesus. what in the gremlins goes on. 

“no, but you get dumber. somehow. as evidenced by your getting out of bed, where you were sleeping with seokjin, to come ask us if we think he like-likes you. are you regressing? because i can’t deal with you going through puberty. again. i still have calluses on my hands from The Summer of Never Ending Laundry.” 

jungkook magnanimously decides to let that slide because jimin being here actually helps him in this quest.

“hyung. what do you think?” jungkook swings a leg over taehyung and rolls to wiggle down into the space between them; so warm and cozy, the perfect little nest to have an existential crisis in in the middle of the night. “i’m hot, right? do you think hyung would think it was cool if i asked to put my tongue in his butt hole or no?” 

taehyung puts a pillow over his own face. next time, jungkook is just going to go straight to jimin with these matters. taehyung’s over-dramatic ass is just too much to deal with. it’s unnecessary and it’s quite frankly exhausting. 

jimin reaches across jungkook to thump the pillow, his laughter basically a cackle even though he woke up like forty seconds ago. so small and yet so full of chaotic energy. he amazes jungkook. inspires him, honestly. 

“every single one of us had a crisis of sexuality when you grew up into this,” jimin says, gesturing at jungkook in general. “even namjoon, which was hilarious to witness, let me tell you. some of my fondest memories of this entire experience were when he had a whole breakdown that time you insisted on doing the ‘magic shop’ choreo in nothing but a pair of short shorts for a full day.” 

this is a lot of information for jungkook to process. he feels distinctly overwhelmed. 

“you mean namjoon - my hero, my inspiration, my second star to the right - wanted to bang _me_? i’m humbled. i don’t deserve.” 

jungkook is definitely going to cry about this later and then kiss namjoon on the forehead again and buy him like four new figurines. he reinforces jungkook’s sense of self esteem without even trying to or telling him. best giant genius leader ever. 

“but wait,” jungkook’s brain has detected something unsettling, “that means - you two wanted to bang me? the horror, hyungs!” he kicks at taehyung and pulls the pillow away from his face to hit jimin with it. 

“for like five fucking seconds, until we remembered that you’re like this,” taehyung finally speaks, blowing his hair out of his face and grimacing as jungkook tries to worm his toes into taehyung’s arm pit. 

“i can’t believe you wanted to suck my dick, hyung. that’s so gay, and not even in the fun way,” jimin and taehyung are like hot or whatever, but fuck. the fact that they harbored these illicit desires for his hot young bod and couldn't even joke about it with him? they must have been super into him; this is so embarrassing for them. jungkook is going to hold it over them for decades. the future is bright and for jungkook it’s going to be full of lamb skewers. 

“says the man who just climbed into bed with two other men to ask if the man he has shared a bed with for four years would be open to letting him rim him,” taehyung says, examining his fingernails in the lamp light like this is the least interesting conversation he’s ever had. fuck this guy, honestly, except not because he’d probably like that, seen as how he’s apparently a sexual deviant. “also can i remind you that everyone in this apartment is a decorated survivor of your teenage sexploits? remember namjoon snapping every pen he held clean in half for months on end when you temporarily decided to devote your life to getting dicked down?” 

“hormones are no joke, hyung and that was for science. also - hello. i’m gay. i want to do a lot of super gay stuff with jin-hyung. but that’s different, we’re in love. you two wanted to do hot gay stuff with me and kept that from me! if you objectify me again without immediately telling me all about it, i’m telling namjoon.” maybe if this thing with seokjin doesn’t pan out, jungkook could try being in love with namjoon. namjoon is smart and kind and his shoulders aren’t that much smaller than seokjin’s. in another life or in a universe where jungkook’s taste in men isn’t ‘seokjin or no’ it could totally work. 

but that’s a lot to think about. it’s too much to think about, actually and jungkook realizes with a start that he’s fallen into a wikipedia wormhole in his own brain because taehyung and jimin aren’t saying anything. 

this happens a lot around jungkook so it’s no real effort to mentally replay the last thing he’d said to figure out what made his hyungs look like they’ve been restored to factory settings. 

except, oh. 

“oh,” he says, always so eloquent when he needs to be. “aren’t we? in love? jin-hyung and i? i mean. i think we - i thought we were?” 

jimin and taehyung look at each other, do that annoying thing they do where they have an entire conversation without moving a single facial muscle. fuck them and their expressive eyes. all jungkook’s eyes ever communicate is absolute panic or his tragic inability to wink. 

“um,” jimin starts and jungkook’s stomach drops like, so hard and so fast that he feels kind of dizzy even though he’s lying down. “i don’t think you can be in love unless you’ve … addressed that? with each other?” 

jungkook shrinks into the sheets between them. makes himself as small as he possibly can but it’s not small enough. he still feels seen. he feels like he’s on display in a way that he never does when he’s wrapped up in seokjin, when he’s hiding behind him, doing whatever he can to live his best life underneath him even if he never gets to get all the way there, not like how he wants.

“but like,” jungkook’s voice sounds so small, so little and petulant even to his own ears. sucks. “i love him?” 

taehyung gathers him up into a hug, which jungkook really appreciates, because taehyung’s noodle limbs do a lot for him, all things considered. 

“we know, babe. why do you think none of us ever tried anything with you, hmm?” jimin is so gentle with him. speaking softly to him in the dead of night, brushing his fingers through jungkook’s hair so carefully, looking at him like if jungkook falls apart then he will too. “i’m not saying he doesn’t feel the same way. i just … i think you need to talk to him about this. ask him, hmm?” 

jimin is so sweet to jungkook. taehyung, too. they hold him tight, let him sleep between them that night and smile at him all sleep soft and lovely when they wake up the next morning. 

they’re the best, really. 

so it sucks that they don’t seem to understand what’s going on here, like - at all. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“can i have a sip, hyung?” hoseok asks, barely awake still and eyeing the iced coffee seokjin had picked up on their way back from the gym. 

he and jungkook got back with just enough time to shower and change and then mercilessly mock the rest of the group as they’d appeared from their bedrooms in turn, in varying degrees of sleepiness but miraculously, all dressed and on time this morning. 

“not even in your dreams,” seokjin tells him, clutching the cup protectively to his chest. he’s old and he’d still dragged himself out of bed at 4am to go to the gym with jungkook while the rest of them were still dead to the world. he deserves his treat. 

jungkook hadn’t wanted anything when they’d stopped off at the coffee shop, didn’t always take too well to caffeine on an empty stomach and didn’t like coffee, anyway. he’d been planning on waiting until after they’ve eaten breakfast to get fucked up on energy drinks. 

he wonders, though. 

“hey, caffeinate me,” he says to seokjin when they’ve piled into the back seat of the car together, seokjin’s coffee steadily dripping condensation down into the cup holder between them. 

seokjin gives him a puzzled look, but reaches for the cup anyway, lifts it to jungkook’s mouth and watches when he takes the straw between his lips and sips. 

no one else sees, so nothing more is said about it, but jungkook thinks about that. 

jungkook can’t stop thinking about that. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

jungkook trusts seokjin completely. 

and so jungkook had waited. 

he’s been waiting for so long now that he’s beginning to wonder if what he’d thought of as inevitable was never actually even a possibility at all. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/


	2. lover come and be my alibi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “if i said i needed to slam your hand in a door for reasons, would you let me?” jungkook demands a couple days later, when he’s really losing patience with this whole thing. 
> 
> “.... what reasons?” he asks eventually and jungkook throws a balled up pair of socks at him and then leaves.

for lack of any better ideas or like, real direction in his life, jungkook lets himself escalate recklessly for a week or so. 

“yah, jin. seokjin. did you see my phone?” seokjin frowns at him, but shakes his head eventually. 

‘get me ice cream’, jungkook texts him when seokjin messages asking if he wants anything brought back from dinner and he knows the convenience store is out of the way, nowhere near the restuarant seokjin went to with some of the manager hyungs while jungkook was recording, but he says it anyway and wilts like a fucking dying flower when he gets home and finds a tub of his favourite flavour in the freezer, a sticky note stuck to the fridge door. it’s got a heart on it next to jungkook’s name and a truly vicious, foul-mouthed warning to anyone else who might try to eat it and jungkook wants to scream but settles for kicking the freezer instead, probably bruising a toe or two but whatever. he’s in agony, seems apt that his body is too. 

there’s a solid six days when jungkook wipes his hands on seokjin’s shirt every single time he washes them. all day long. and seokjin ‘yah!’s and playfully pushes him away, pretends to scowl and half-heartedly kicks at him, but he still stands next to jungkook at the sinks in the bathroom, still follows him in there in the morning to brush their teeth side by side, like always. 

jungkook takes to eating like, exclusively from seokjin’s plate. doesn’t even put one out for himself when he’s setting the table, just sits down next to seokjin and throws his legs over his lap and opens his mouth and waits. 

there’s a ringing silence the first time he does it and that ringing silence gets somehow even louder when seokjin just scoops up a spoonful of rice, loads it with meat and kimchi and brings it straight to jungkook’s mouth; feeds jungkook before he feeds himself. seokjin seems very pointedly determined not to look at anyone besides jungkook and jungkook wants to be mad at that, he really is pissed off as all hell just in general, but his traitorous seokjin-specific hyung kink just makes his whole idiot body thrum a little like he’s vibrating on a higher frequency now and all he can actually make himself do is not take a victory lap of the table when seokjin puts his hand high up on jungkook’s thigh and leans in to wipe away a smear of sauce with the pad of his thumb. he licks it off his own hand, like the personalised-to-all-of-jungkook’s-kinks-and-specifications real life porn star that he is and jungkook doesn’t sink to the floor between his knees and beg for his dick. that quite frankly heroic display of self control is all that day can ask for or expect from jungkook, thank you and goodnight. 

“if i said i needed to slam your hand in a door for reasons, would you let me?” jungkook demands a couple days later, when he’s really losing patience with this whole thing. 

seokjin looks at jungkook over his phone, just his eyes and his stupidly perfect eyebrows visible, his mouth hidden. 

“.... what reasons?” he asks eventually and jungkook throws a balled up pair of socks at him and then leaves. 

he comes back twenty minutes later and silently climbs under the covers, lies next to seokjin. he rolls over into the middle of the bed until seokjin wraps his arms around him and presses his nose into jungkook’s hair and sighs so softly, so quiet that jungkook wouldn’t notice it if it wasn’t the one sound his whole day, his whole life sometimes, revolves around. 

jungkook tugs gently at seokjin’s clothes, turns onto his front and reaches behind himself and finds seokjin’s elbows and encourages him to move over, move closer, come up and come here until he’s mostly lying on top of jungkook, his shoulders stacked up on top of jungkook’s, one of his hip bones pressing into jungkook’s lower back.

like this, jungkook can press his face into sheets that smell like both of them and drift off to sleep; head empty, no thoughts, seokjin smothering him like god intended. 

with seokjin warm and familiar on top of him, holding him down and keeping him safe, jungkook sleeps sweetly, sleeps easy. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“so. do you think seokjin hyung would buy me a house, if i asked him to?” 

jungkook doesn’t need a house. jungkook could afford to buy himself one or twelve if he did. but the question still stands. 

“any of us would buy you a house. we’d all buy you a house,” namjoon says through a yawn and jungkook had forgotten that namjoon had been momentarily dick-whipped for him, according to jimin. that might complicate this. he should have thought more carefully before he decided to infiltrate another hyung’s bed in the dead of night. next time, next time. 

“sure,” jungkook says, because who wouldn’t want to buy him a house, honestly, he’s got this trophy wife shit on lock. “but if seokjin hyung wasn’t rich and neither was i, do you think he’d still marry me? like - for love, instead of for money?” 

namjoon rubs at his eyes and jungkook feels bad for 0.4 seconds. that might be a record for him. it’s not really because he feels bad for namjoon though, it’s just because jungkook really fucking loves sleeping. he’d be pissed as hell if someone woke him up two hours before his alarm to chat about their love life. but he’s never been anything other than the maknae, beloved and indulged at every turn, so he’s going to just keep on keeping on until someone tells him to do otherwise. it’ll have to be seokjin, if it happens, because jungkook isn’t in the habit of doing what anyone else tells him. he’s got standards. 

“are you worried that seokjin is a gold digger? because i don’t think he wants your money, i don’t think -” namjoon squints and frowns at the same time, tilting his head from side to side to crack his neck and probably only waking up for real now, a full ten minutes after jungkook climbed into his bed and started bombarding him with questions. 

“nooo hyung. it’s not about my money. it’s about his money. do you think he’d spend it all on me? if i wanted him to? what if i didn’t want him to?” namjoon’s bed is super comfy. his sheets are definitely way cleaner than taehyung’s. if all of this results in a broken home and jungkook needs to find a new bed to sleep in, this one is looking pretty promising. 

“but why would you - is something going on, jungkook? is someone trying to blackmail you? because if that’s the case we need to go to -” 

“oh for fuck’s sake,” yoongi says and jesus shitting christ jungkook really needs to start bringing a torch to these midnight adventures, can’t believe he apparently needs to do a head count before he climbs into bed with his hyungs, but here he is and this is the reality. 

“this fucking -” yoongi pokes jungkook in the face. hard. “infant antichrist is trying to ask you if you think his boner for jin hyung is reciprocated or not. why he thinks you’re the person to ask, i have no clue. why he’s asking at fuck o’clock in the morning, i have even less of a clue.” 

“that’s a lot of f-bombs from someone wearing footie pajamas, hyung.” jungkook isn’t ever exactly confident about sassing yoongi, but if ever there was a time for it, it’d be right now. his bed head is absolutely adorable and he’s wrapped himself around one of namjoon’s arms like a tiny, ferocious koala. 

“also, if namjoon hyung isn’t the right person to ask, who is?” does hobi possess some kind of knowledge or ability that would help jungkook through this crisis? because honestly, jungkook has been under the impression that all hobi possessed was really fucking questionable fashion sense. 

“um. seokjin-hyung? obviously?” which, rude. namjoon hadn’t even understood what jungkook was asking until yoongi translated for him. how could it be obvious? nothing about this situation made sense or was straight forward. jungkook would know, because he’s been trapped in this weirdly sexy maze for years now. no one understands his pain. his extremely horny pain. 

yoongi levels a withering glance at him like he can hear his thoughts and is judging him for them. 

“you can stay here if you want,” he says, still glaring but brushing his nose against namjoon’s shoulder in a way that’s utterly fucking adorable and settling back in to go back to sleep. “but if you hump namjoon in your sleep i’m telling jin.” 

again, rude. jungkook can’t help who he humps in his sleep. must he inform everyone that any sleep humping he partakes in doesn’t count unless it’s seokjin? must he be held accountable for his own actions? that doesn’t sound very ‘the maknae life of jeon jungkook’ to him. 

regardless of these hostile and quite frankly targeting conditions, jungkook stays where he is. namjoon’s bed really is very nice, even if yoongi snaps his teeth at him if he wiggles too close to namjoon. jungkook makes a mental note to check that they’ve gotten him all his shots. just in case. humping namjoon in his sleep probably isn’t _not_ worth getting bitten for. 

when he pushes the door to his and seokjin’s room open early the next morning, seokjin is already awake and scrolling through something on his phone. he looks up when jungkook closes the door behind him. 

“welcome home cheater,” he says and jungkook’s mouth drops open so hard that it actually kind of hurts. he’d always suspected he’d one day dislocate his jaw for seokjin, but not like this. dear god, not like this. 

“you, of all people, are one to talk, hyung,” jungkook says, momentarily taking a stand because yes, seokjin is exceptionally attractive and also the love of jungkook’s life and as such - yes, he has the right to tell lies whenever, wherever, however, to whomever he wants, in jungkook’s studied opinion, but not here. not to him. 

seokjin frowns, confused and jungkook sighs, so absolutely and totally done with his shit that he doesn’t even think about sucking seokjin’s dick when he climbs out of bed in nothing but the smallest, tightest pair of briefs jungkook has ever seen. 

he does, however, take a mental picture for future use and then curse himself to hell for sleeping in someone else’s bed last night. 

why the fuck had he wasted time talking about his feelings and trying not to hump namjoon when he could have been here, in his own bed, getting away with humping seokjin? 

the briefs are dark grey and stretchy, the material pulled taut across the sharp curves of seokjin’s hipbones and jungkook knows in his heart and in his soul (which, he finds, currently resides in his balls) that he was meant - nay, _fated_ to have been here last night, sleep humping seokjin until his hyung stained his tiny briefs for him. 

“do you need laundry done?” jungkook asks, struck by inspiration. “you should shower. i’m going to put a load in - uh, on. i’m going to wash clothes. you should give me your underwear. for washing.” 

the silence that follows is pretty fucking full, honestly. it’s overflowing; the elephant in the room that is jungkook’s clear intention to jerk off with his hyung’s underwear staring down the blatant, the glaringly obvious, caps locked fact that jungkook has never in his life done laundry on a whim. his laundry schedule is set, fore-planned and perfect. 

with a quick but burning look of pure and total despair, seokjin walks into the bathroom and shuts the door behind him, all but slamming it. 

the door opens again a second later but only his foot appears, kicking his underwear across the room to land at jungkook’s feet. 

by the time jungkook looks up from it, staring at it for a second in absolute wonder, tilting his head to look at it like it’s a framed masterpiece on a museum’s wall, the door has closed again, the lock clicking a second later. 

jungkook scoops the still warm scrap of cloth up off the floor and shoves it into his hoodie pocket, silently thanking the gods both new and old and then wondering, idly, when exactly it was that the fates decided that they’d be the only ones to ever ride his ass. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

the problem, in a nutshell, is as follows - 

seokjin is fucking whipped for jungkook. 

on all levels except physical, jungkook is much the same. well, maybe not verbally, because jungkook lives to talk down to seokjin and get away with it. he secretly hopes that seokjin is keeping a running tally of things he has to punish jungkook for when he finally gets around to reaming him. 

but, oh woe is jungkook, because it’s looking increasingly likely that that’s never ever going to happen. 

because jungkook is backed into a corner here and he can’t make seokjin figure out how to get him out of it when he wants seokjin all up in there with him, all up in _him_ , actually, if we’re getting explicit and jungkook would very much like to, please and thank you. 

jungkook is also shit out of luck, because jungkook has exactly one move and one move only. 

whatever jungkook wants or needs, he simply goes to seokjin and asks for. 

it never fails. 

it more than likely wouldn’t fail in this case, either. 

and therein lies the thorn in jungkook’s perineum. 

if he goes to seokjin and simply asks him to push him down onto the nearest horizontal surface and let jungkook try to get fucked to the point of actually being absorbed into seokjin’s body, venom-style, seokjin will probably just frown at him in mild disappointment and then clear off his desk. 

and on the one hand - a victory. a winning for jeon jungkook. 

but on the other, much uglier hand, the kind that looks like something out of harry potter and not even in the cool way, jungkook would have absolutely no way of knowing whether seokjin actually wanted to sexually devastate him; mind, body and hole, or whether he was just entertaining jungkook’s whims, as usual. 

jungkook’s one and only true desire is to get vored by seokjin, but it doesn’t count if he can’t know that seokjin really wants to vore him. 

oh, the mortifying ordeal of getting your beautiful bandmate to fuck you like he means it. 

jungkook despairs. 

and then jungkook goes on an impromptu midnight tour of all the rooms in this apartment and is at every turn given the same answer, the same bullshit advice that is at the very root of his problem in the first place. 

jungkook can’t ask seokjin shit. he definitely can’t ask for what he wants, because seokjin - the big, gorgeous bastard - will just _give it to him_. 

only, not how jungkook wants it. 

maybe he is spoiled, he thinks. for all of eleven seconds, until he dismisses the possibility. he’s not spoiled, he’s just special. and he deserves everything his heart desires, his hyungs have repeatedly told him so, offered even to provide, on occasion. 

and so jungkook is at a stalemate with his dicklust for kim seokjin. 

it’s more likely than you’d think, he’s entirely sure. 

he can’t imagine that most people who meet seokjin aren’t left in some state of chronic lust for him. 

high schools should teach classes on what to do in this very real, surely globally experienced situation rather than wasting everyone’s time with pointless shit like science and mathematics. jungkook is going to tweet about this from his secret twitter account and it’s probably going to go viral because he’s so in touch with the people and their true needs. 

in the meantime, though, jungkook is going to do what he does best. 

jungkook is going to act the fuck up. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

after shows, they’re all so hyped up and exhausted at the same time that collapsing onto a couch, onto one another, for a photo is a mindless thing. 

jungkook’s pulse is thrumming, his heart still pounding in his chest and his legs shake half from the adrenaline shot that is performing, half from exertion. 

he stops off to grab a bottle of water from a table inside the door before heading across the room to the rest of them and by the time he gets there, they’re all piled up and ready to go. 

seokjin is sitting in the very middle of the couch, squashed in between taehyung and hoseok and namjoon is sitting on the floor in front of him, seokjin’s knees spread wide around his shoulders, seokjin sitting forward to loop his arms around namjoon’s neck as he says something into his ear. 

laughing, namjoon tilts his head to look back at seokjin, but he’s still leaning in so close that their noses almost brush. 

it’s cute. 

jungkook _seethes_. 

“excuse me,” he says, pushing past yoongi, sitting up on the arm of the couch. 

“sorry, sorry hyung,” he says to hoseok when he has to climb over him, nearly kneeing him in the face in the process. 

“excuse me, so sorry, sorry hyung, m’just trying to get to my seat,” he says when he puts a hand on both seokjin’s shoulder and namjoon’s and physically pushes them apart. he pushes until he has seokjin held down against the back of the couch and then, once he’s satisfied that seokjin isn’t going to move, he throws one leg over seokjin’s thighs and settles in his lap. 

there’s a beat of silence, before the staff asks hesitantly if they’re ready to take the picture. 

“yes,” jungkook says, leaning back, letting seokjin take his full weight and he wants to roar in victory when after a pause, seokjin snakes his arms around his waist and holds him tight. 

there’s no space between their bodies at all and for once, jungkook gets to sit in someone else’s lap and doesn’t worry if he’s too heavy, doesn’t try to balance his weight to make himself lighter. with seokjin, jungkook doesn’t have to try to make himself smaller or easier to manage because seokjin is big enough to make him feel that way anyway. he bends his knee, shifting until he’s got both of jungkook’s thighs pressed inside the cradle of his own and it barely takes effort. he never fails to show jungkook that for seokjin, handling him isn’t a problem at all. 

jungkook puts his cheek to seokjin’s and throws up a peace sign, for good measure, because all is well in the world once more. 

jungkook sits, smug on his throne and smiles for the camera. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

it’s wild, jungkook thinks, how many of their fans insist on shipping seokjin with other members of the group when jungkook is like, right there. usually on seokjin. definitely touching him, at least. 

like, each to their own and all that, but jinkooker’s rise, is what jungkook is saying. 

“what are you playing, i’ve never seen you concentrate this hard before,” seokjin says, one hand going to jungkook’s neck to brush through the hair that lies there. 

“i’m not gaming, i’m -” how does jungkook explain that he’s blocking fan accounts from his private twitter? oh, right, he doesn’t. seokjin would for sure think that was weird. “i’m watching porn.” 

“oh,” seokjin says. “right here in the living room? i told yoongi you needed stricter boundaries as a child, but he didn’t listen and look where that got us. it’s sad, really. you could have been such a good boy.” 

“i still could be, hyung,” jungkook says, looking up at seokjin through his eyelashes, biting down on one side of his bottom lip. if he was wearing a skirt, he’d clutch at the hem of it. maybe he needs to buy a skirt. 

seokjin’s hand goes still on the back of jungkook’s neck and in jungkook’s dreams tonight, that hand is going to close around his throat, he can already tell. 

but then seokjin’s hand drops away completely and he’s shaking his head faintly as he walks away, basically jogging to get away from jungkook. 

this is not at all what jungkook wants. in fact, it’s the exact opposite of what jungkook wants and, well. 

that seems like progress. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“please. i’m begging you. please just use a spoon. i’ll get you one. i’ll do anything. please.” 

taehyung looks close to tears and jungkook cackles internally, but externally just lets his eyebrows rise on his forehead, feigns absolute innocence as he dips his banana into his tub of yoghurt and then licks it off. 

across the room, yoongi is pretending to be asleep but his hands are white-knuckled on the edge of his seat. namjoon is in the makeup chair next to jungkook’s, his knees pressed together so hard that jungkook can actually hear the material of his pants straining. hoseok has his head in his hands. jimin is doing push ups in the corner, shouting out his count increasingly manically. 

it’s sweet that his hyungs are all warm for his form, but they’re not the target audience today. or ever. 

seokjin is at the hairstyling station. he’s sitting on the opposite side of the room to jungkook and they’ve got their backs to one another, but they make eye contact through the mirrors a time or two. they’d sustain that eye contact if jungkook had anything to say about it. he’d hold seokjin’s gaze and deep throat this banana until he choked on it, if seokjin would just be a good hyung and do what jungkook wants him to do, but he’s just sitting very stiffly upright and very still, staring straight ahead instead. he looks a little pale but that’s probably just because he hasn’t had his makeup done yet. 

it’s maddening, honestly and jungkook is sick of seokjin’s shit. he’s sick to his back teeth of seokjin walking around like one of those chinese puzzles that jungkook has never had the patience for, except the puzzle is seokjin’s esteem and affection and the prize hidden inside is jungkook getting the dicking of a lifetime. 

jungkook is just about at breaking point. 

no thoughts, head empty, he gets up and crosses the room, fruit accomplice still in hand and dripping yoghurt. he crosses his arms around seokjin’s neck and then leans down and rests his chin on seokjin’s shoulder. 

in the mirror, seokjin’s eyes track the path of the banana as jungkook brings it to his mouth and sucks. a dollop of yoghurt drips down onto his hand and jungkook puts his thumb in his mouth, hollows his cheeks around it as he licks it clean. 

“want a bite, hyung?” jungkook asks, holding the banana in front of seokjin’s face and seokjin goes briefly cross-eyed looking at it. 

“would i like a bite of the piece of fruit you’ve been using as a yoghurt ferrying vessel for twenty six minutes now?” his voice keeps rising as the sentence progresses and his eyes are really big and his shoulders feel a lot like they could be the most comfortable, the most perfectly jungkook shaped seat in existence. jungkook’s pants get a little bit tighter. 

but he realizes then that everyone in the room is looking at them, staff included and jungkook generally isn’t one for acknowledging embarrassment, but it’s different when it comes to seokjin, everything is different when it comes to him and seokjin, so he relents. 

jungkook is heavily invested in being seokjin’s complete undoing, but he’s still not entirely confident that seokjin wants him that way and he’d really rather not find out in front of a live audience. just in case, just on the off chance that seokjin isn’t into him. that doesn’t sound likely or awesome to jungkook, but still. caution is important. ‘safety first, safety second and coolness third,’ as one of the greatest minds of these times once said. and while it would be super cool to choke himself on seokjin’s dick in front of literally anyone who cared to watch, it would be decidedly uncool to suffer the humiliation of seokjin telling him he thinks he’s ugly when there are other people around to see jungkook cry. 

“yeah, you’re right. it’s gross, sorry hyung,” jungkook says, unhanding seokjin and backing down, maybe for the first time in history. all because he doesn’t want to be someone that seokjin is embarrassed by. he barely recognizes himself anymore. having feelings is ruining jungkook’s life. 

he goes to sit next to yoongi and tries not to sulk as noise slowly filters back into the room and everything goes back to normal. he eats the banana in small bites, chewing despondently and despairing of his one sided love. 

jungkook doesn’t quite know if he’s mad at himself for still having the capacity to care about what seokjin might think when jungkook puts him on the spot in front of other people, or if he’s just extremely sad about his continued failure to get under seokjin. 

either way, that day’s a wash. 

the performance goes off without a hitch. everything goes smoothly, goes perfectly, until jungkook blinks and finds himself in the very center of the stage, bright burning lights all but blinding him, looking down at his own feet and watching them move through choreography that seems like something someone else learned, in that moment. 

losing himself in performing has always been one of jungkook’s favourite states of being - giving himself over entirely into each performance is who he is. 

but loving seokjin is who he is, too. and if he can be newly, tentatively unsure of one, what’s to say the same can’t become true of the other? not this brand new experience, which says that exactly to jungkook. 

seokjin is his center and with doubt gnawing at their connection for jungkook, everything else that’s part of him feels all of a sudden potentially very far away too. 

across the stage, seokjin is beautiful beneath lights that make all the best parts of him shine. he moves fluidly, he moves with purpose, graceful and sure. 

seokjin is certainty, even when jungkook is just the bones of who he means to be padded out into the vague shape of a real person with nothing but questions. especially then, maybe. 

all in all, jungkook is still no closer to getting what he wants or figuring out what he needs to do to go get it himself. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

as usual, things stay the same between them. 

everything is normal. exactly like it’s always been. 

some people would call that stability, but jungkook calls it hell on earth. 

their schedules ramp up a little bit, the lead up to comeback starting in earnest and they’re all used to the flow of things and naturally fall into a new rhythm; almost instinctual by now. 

what’s different this time is that seokjin stutters. 

some days, it feels like he’s always half a step behind the rest of them. 

it’s not a big deal, they all go through this for different reasons. personal problems, professional slumps, extreme and unfiltered horniness in jungkook’s case. 

it’s easy to step up and cover for seokjin. 

but it is not easy, however, to follow him into bed every night and not know how to ask if jungkook can try to fix it, ask what he needs and then provide exactly that, because a very unfortunate side effect of jungkook’s abject pining is that he no longer knows where the line lies, between them. 

up until now, jungkook has never had to know. he waited, in the beginning, for seokjin to show him where his lines lay the same way the other hyungs did - patiently. kindly, even if only after the fact. 

jungkook is no stranger to getting yelled at by yoongi, startled into a rare outburst by jungkook bulldozing over his boundaries because he barrels through life like a bowling ball that’s propelled by exuberance and fighting spirit. 

namjoon still sits him down for carefully disguised lectures every now and then and jungkook always comes out of them with actual notes, feeling and acting like a better person.

jimin can be a little slap happy, but his hands are like tiny toy appendages so jungkook can just pretend it hurts in the moment and then solemnly apologize later. 

taehyung was tricky at first, can still sometimes get kind of cold with jungkook if he accidentally pushes him too far on something, but once jungkook figured out that that wasn’t because he hated jungkook now but rather just because taehyung couldn’t figure out how to communicate his hurt without making it hurt more, it was simple enough to reassure taehyung and better understand him, better respect and revere him too. 

hoseok waits until after dance practice to talk to jungkook about anything that’s bothering him, anything he thinks jungkook needs to know about their relationship. jungkook understands that on a fundamental level, because sometimes he dances his frustrations and confusions away too and he knows something needs to be talked about if it persists even after the cathartic process of physical exhaustion. words aren’t what hoseok reaches for first and that makes sense to jungkook, but so do hoseok’s thoughts when he makes the effort to explain them, when it’s important to both of them that jungkook knows how he feels. 

seokjin has never talked to jungkook about his boundaries. he’s never told jungkook “enough,” or asked him to stop, or told him that he’s gone too far. 

it’s pretty on brand for seokjin and how he is - how he’s always been - with jungkook. 

jungkook asks sometimes, just in case. he’s told seokjin time and time again that if he ever does something that seokjin doesn’t like, he’ll stop immediately, he’ll reflect, he’ll repent. seokjin always, every single time, says that jungkook will be the first to know when jungkook crosses a line with him and jungkook believes him. he’s never brought anything up with jungkook, though and jungkook doesn’t know what to do with that, doesn’t know what to make of it. 

the mere idea of hurting seokjin, on purpose or not, makes jungkook’s stomach roll. 

the thought that seokjin might be letting jungkook trample all over his feelings just for the sake of indulging a spoiled dongsaeng makes jungkook want to roll into a harbour. in a chill way. like, maybe with a back handspring or something. 

and so the reasons why jungkook can’t just ask seokjin for what he wants keep on piling up. 

and worse, they’re joined by jungkook’s mounting fear that if there’s this one thing that he can’t talk to seokjin about now, maybe that thing will eventually, inevitably, lead to more things of the same nature. 

and if there’s this thing he must keep from seokjin - if he potentially is someone who keeps things from seokjin now - who is to say that seokjin isn’t doing the same? who's to say that seokjin hasn’t been doing just that this entire time? 

jungkook is maybe spiralling. 

but it’s fine, he can multitask like a boss. 

a little thing like doubting the very foundations of the most important relationship in his life isn’t going to slow his roll. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

it is, however, perhaps going to make jungkook all but completely unhinged. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

it’s such an innocent thing, is the worst part. 

it’s absolutely nothing, but jungkook still reacts like his life itself is under threat. 

they’re playing a dumb game for run bts and they have been for hours now. they’re sitting in a so closely overlapping circle that jungkook is easily within touching distance of every single one of his bandmates. normally, this would be very extremely jungkook’s shit, but the problem with him being able to touch everyone else is that that means that they can all touch each other, too. and they’re basically the most tactile motherfuckers on the planet, most of the time. jungkook sometimes feels like he has seven physical forms, he so easily and automatically identifies each of the others that it’s not just familiarity anymore, it’s deeper than that, it’s personal, it’s subjective. he’s spent the lion’s share of his life being touched by them, touching them, watching them touch each other and it’s never strange to him, never foreign, although no - jungkook does not want to watch jimin and taehyung’s homemade porn, thank you but absolutely fuck no thank you. 

to cut to the chase, the problem as it is specific to today is that pretty much everyone is treating seokjin’s person like their own, like it could so easily be theirs for the taking, like _he_ could be theirs and jungkook - 

jungkook is feeling a lot of things that he can’t really put into words, but it’s a lot, as he may have mentioned. it’s like. so, so very much. 

so when hoseok - sweet, sunny, honey-bright hoseok - laces his fingers with seokjin’s and leans in to rub his nose along seokjin’s jaw and jungkook without thinking, without even realizing he was about to do it, shoves hoseok so hard that he falls back and cracks his head against the marble floor, jungkook is the one who bursts into tears. 

filming stops and staff tend to hoseok. he isn’t badly hurt, isn’t bleeding or anything, but he’s got a pretty sizeable goose egg and no matter how much he laughs it off and does silly voices to reassure jungkook like he’s a fucking toddler getting a shot, jungkook just keeps crying harder. 

the other hyungs cajole him too, pat him and hoseok in turn until jungkook is smiling through his tears, though they still won’t stop and this is in no way helped by the fact that seokjin hasn’t said a thing, won’t even look at him. 

turns out it’s all fun and games trying and habitually failing to get into your hyung’s pants until you realize that actually being in love with him and not knowing what to do about it has turned you into a monster. 

jungkook insists on piggybacking hoseok everywhere for the rest of the day, even to the bathroom, even to bed that night and when he offers to stay he is both disappointed and terrified when hoseok waves him off. 

because then jungkook has to go back to his own room. 

where seokjin is sitting up in bed, his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped tight around them. 

he’s clearly waiting for jungkook and jungkook wants, for the first time in his life, to run away from seokjin. 

“'guk, 'guk-ah” seokjin says when jungkook climbs into bed, sticks to his side for once and refuses to meet seokjin’s eyes. “sweetheart, what happened today with hobi. you ... you can’t do that.” 

jungkook’s eyes sting, but he resolutely blinks back tears. he’s cried enough today and seokjin has every right to say this, has every right in the fucking world to tell jungkook to stop treating him like he’s his property, because he isn’t. he’s not jungkook’s anything. he’s not jungkook’s. 

it breaks jungkook’s heart, just a little bit, that seokjin calls him ‘sweetheart.’ that jungkook has to sit here in their bed and hear seokjin call him that while he punches his hand into jungkook’s chest and drags the very worst, the ugliest parts of him right out into the open, to sit grisly and grotesque between them. 

“i know. i’m sorry, hyung. i’m so sorry. i know,” he says. 

“we’re … you and i have always been a little different, huh?” seokjin says and jungkook doesn’t know why he sounds sad about that, because it’s the best part of jungkook’s day, the best thing he’s ever gotten to experience in his life, but seokjin says it like it’s something bad, “i know that you … you feel a certain way for hyung, hm? and that’s fine. that’s okay, guk. but you can’t let it hurt people.” he’s being so patient with jungkook, so careful and solemn even when he’s eviscerating him. even when he’s telling him that jungkook being in love with him has finally, after all this time, become a problem. and must stop. 

“i’m sorry, hyung. i’ll do better. ‘m sorry,” jungkook says, panicked and hurting and not knowing what to do but needing to say something that will make it better, make it easier, even if only for seokjin. 

when seokjin doesn’t say anything else and jungkook can’t either, he lies down; puts his head on his own pillow and stays staring up at the ceiling, naked in the worst way without seokjin blanketing him. 

jungkook falls asleep knowing. knowing, then. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

it’s incredible, jungkook finds, how far away you can feel from someone who is right beside you all day long. 

it’s honestly mind-blowing, how lonely jungkook is for someone he sleeps next to every night. 

life as a means of existence goes on, even though jungkook’s own life has kind of ended. 

he’s probably going to have to start thinking about ordering a bed for his room and if that’s not death, he doesn’t know what is. 

all of the hyungs corner him at some point, concerned and confused and caring, but jungkook fends them off with the excuse that he’s fine, he’s just working some things out, he just needs some space, he’ll come to them if he needs them. 

all of the hyungs begrudgingly accept this, but not seokjin because seokjin doesn’t ask what’s going on. 

that’s how jungkook knows this is really the end. 

he pulls all the way away from seokjin, as much as he can. he distances himself, not completely, but further than he’s ever been from seokjin before.

and seokjin doesn’t say a thing. 

he smiles at jungkook sometimes. this unprovoked, misplaced, wretchedly strained thing that’s meant to be a smile, at least. 

he keeps touching him, too, but now jungkook can see him counting down the seconds in his head until it’s been long enough that he can let go without it looking unnatural, not normal. 

but that’s how everything is between them, now, because there is no “them.” 

life goes on. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

a couple weeks go by like that. there are tense moments. times when it feels like everything is all of a sudden so brittle that if jungkook speaks or moves or thinks or breathes everything around him will just shatter. everything inside of him is already in pieces. 

seokjin keeps jungkook close, but he’s making a clear effort to be close to everyone, to show jungkook that he’s not anyone’s. that he’s definitely not jungkook’s. 

sometimes it seems like the rest of bangtan are skirting around them, careful not to get too close but never going too far, either; in case they’re needed, in case they have to douse the fire now that jungkook has set his home ablaze. 

jungkook feels for them. he honestly, truly does. 

and that’s why when seokjin tells him one night, when they’re side by side in bed and as far away from one another as they’ve ever been, that he’s going out with a friend tomorrow night and would jungkook like to come, jungkook should come, it would be good for them to get out of the house for a while, be somewhere else, with different people - jungkook agrees. 

he can read between the lines. it’s still slow going, figuring out what seokjin is saying when he has to decode it now instead of just listening, just feeling, but jungkook’s working hard at it. he knows that what seokjin is really saying is “i’m going out tomorrow night to drink away the agony of having to deal with you and though the last thing i want is to spend time with you when i’m not being paid to, i feel bad for the rest of your hyungs who have to put up with you and your bullshit and i think it would be nice to give them a break.” 

jungkook can only agree. 

which is how he finds himself sitting across a table from jaehwan and seokjin, crammed onto a tiny bench together and looking not at all displeased about it. 

jungkook orders a drink. 

he’s met jaehwan a bunch of times before. he’s always liked him, likes him tonight. 

but it’s too soon. 

it’s too soon for him to be confronted by the reality of watching seokjin be not even a little bit, not even just in some ways _his_. the bangtan hyungs know what jungkook is like. they’ve never told him not to treat seokjin proprietarily and that makes sense, because that’s seokjin’s job. but seokjin never had, until he did and jungkook is still adjusting. 

jungkook for the first time in his life feels truly and completely lost. 

thinking about it doesn’t help, so jungkook decides to drink about it instead. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

jaehwan is such a nice hyung. 

he’s like, tall. he’s kind. he’s funny. and he’s got a good face. his shoulders aren’t as broad as seokjin’s, but then no-one’s are, so you can’t hold that against him. 

“i don’t hold it against you, jaehwan hyung. it’s not your fault. it can’t be helped,” he assures jaehwan, who only smiles at him. he looks patient, which jungkook gets a lot, but he also seems fascinated and it’s been a long time since someone found jungkook newly interesting.

“seokjin hyung doesn’t find me interesting at all,” he laments and seokjin starts to say something, gets all of a sudden very briefly very loud for a second, but jaehwan shushes him. 

“shut up, jinnie, he’s clearly in the middle of something here, i want to try and put the pieces together.” 

jaehwan leans forward, smiles encouragingly at jungkook and gestures for him to continue. nice hyung. 

“nice hyung. not like seokjin hyung. seokjin hyung isn’t nice. seokjin hyung is the worst.” 

“is he?” jaehwan is basically on the table now, “tell me more about that.” 

jungkook nods. jaehwan understands. maybe this entire time jaehwan was the one he needed to talk to about this. 

“okay, so like. to set the scene - we have jungkook, me,” jungkook points to himself. he thinks. “young, hot, wealthy. a brat, by some accounts, but not a baby, fuck you and your weird fetishes, jimin.” 

seokjin is frowning now, but this isn’t about him, this is about jungkook. and how he’s in love with seokjin. 

“except he doesn’t wanna vore me. which, like. a valid life choice, i’m sure. we respect choices in this household. consent is sexy. enthusiastic consent is even sexier,” where was jungkook going with this? he had a point, right? he looks at seokjin, maybe seokjin remembers what he’d been trying to say. “but nothing is as sexy as seokjin’s shoulders, honestly. on god, no one loves anyone or anything like i love that man’s shoulders. his whole entire big ass body. every stupidly sturdy inch of him. fuck, he’s so hot,” and there we are, jungkook is back on track. back on form, in top form, as the fates intended. “in conclusion: seokjin doesn’t wanna instill in me his big dick energy so now i’m going to die alone, not knowing what it feels like to be a puddle for seokjin to lay in.” 

the bar they’re in is loud. like, really loud. but their table must be in space, because a silent vacuum consumes them. jungkook is jealous. why can’t he be consumed. shit isn’t fair. 

“just,” jaehwan speaks carefully. like jungkook is an infant or maybe some kind of spooked animal. “just to be totally clear. your problem is that jimin doesn’t want to vore you, even though he’s - allegedly - kinky as fuck? but you also seem to have an active interest in jin? sexually?” 

seokjin fills a glass with soju and downs the entire thing. it’s not a shot glass. even when he’s ruining jungkook’s life he’s a whole mood. a full five course meal. 

“ew, no. gross. i don’t want jimin to vore me. i support his high protein lifestyle but like … where would he even put me? have you seen his little body? he’s basically a hobbit. a really sexy hobbit. he doesn’t have room inside himself for me. but seokjin does. seokjin could just eat me up and keep it pushing. seokjin could snack on me.” 

“and that’s -” both jaehwans seem equally confused. jungkook has hit another dead end. seems apt, honestly. his whole life is running headfirst into a brick wall, lately. “that’s something you’d … enjoy?” 

“it’s my dream,” jungkook says, emphatic, sighing in contentment because he loves talking about his life’s work. even if it’s in total tatters now. 

the jaewhans start to get blurry and also fast. it’s like jungkook’s eyes are a blender. maybe jungkook is a blender. he certainly feels like he could spew some pureed food stuffs at a ceiling right about now. it’s not like he’s got anything better to do, now that his whole life is over, after all. 

“seokjin killed my dreams. i miss him very much. don’t tell him i kept his underwear.”

jaehwan’s eyes are really, really big. and seokjin’s are really small. oh, his eyes are closed. seokjin must be sad. maybe he misses seokjin too. 

“understandable, have a nice day,” jungkook tells him and then everything goes black. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

tragically, jungkook wakes up the next day. 

death would have been not only kinder, but also preferable. 

he wakes up in his and seokjin’s bed with no memory of having gotten there, apart from one horrific flashback shot that seems to depict him being piggybacked by seokjin, clinging to his shoulders and mumbling into seokjin’s neck about how if being under seokjin wasn’t the life for him, he might have chosen being on top of seokjin instead. 

he tries to get out of bed and make for the bathroom, determined to throw up until all the evil has left his body but he is thwarted by the trunk like limbs weighing him down. 

the thigh thrown over his is a thing of absolute majesty and even as jungkook is thinking this, the hips attached to it start to shift, minutely grinding against jungkook. 

it is as a true testament to just how much jungkook is suffering, that he lies very very still, regrets every single one of his life choices up to this point and lets namjoon hump him in his sleep. 

he doesn’t even enjoy it. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

an hour later, breakfast time in the bangtan household finds a still exceptionally hungover jungkook standing on the kitchen table with one foot on yoongi’s forehead, doing his damndest to keep his hyung from battering him to death with a spatula. 

“it was like ten seconds of mindless humping, hyung. we’ve gone further than that passing each other in the hallway! and i didn’t even like it!” 

“ _liar_ ,” yoongi hisses, swinging wildly for jungkook, splattering them both with flecks of pancake batter, “everyone who sees namjoon wants to climb him like a tree. what makes you think lying to me is going to make this any better?” 

and honestly, that’s about to spark a debate that will probably wind up into being more of an enthused verbal love letter, written, produced and performed by min yoongi with a heartfelt feature from jeon jungkook, but just then someone clears their throat pretty pointedly. 

“sorry to interrupt,” seokjin says, standing in the doorway and looking exceptionally gray. like, existentially. “but i just wanted to say goodbye.” 

there’s a small suitcase pushed off to one side behind him and jungkook’s heart stops beating. his foot falls from yoongi’s head with a miserable little thwap of sweaty skin on glass tabletop.  
batter drips from yoongi’s spatula into a steadily increasing puddle on the kitchen floor and jungkook looks at it and thinks ‘same.’ 

“you’re leaving?” jungkook asks and as soon as he opens his mouth yoongi is dropping the spatula and waddling out of the room like the penguin from happy feet might have if he’d been cast in ‘the fast and the furious.’ 

seokjin looks after him longingly. 

“forever?” jungkook asks, devastated for about eleven different reasons at once. he’s still standing on the table. he might just live here, now. a life without seokjin doesn’t really seem worth climbing down for. or living. 

“of course not forever,” seokjin sighs. he looks exhausted, he looks absolutely done with all of this and jungkook for the first time in his life truly hates himself. “i’m going home for a few days. the company thinks it will do me good.” 

jungkook stares at him. 

“and you … agree with them?” 

this is devastating. he’s broken seokjin. he hasn’t just cost himself the love of his life, he’s actually been such a terrible burden of a wretched human being that seokjin listens to the company now. jungkook doesn’t know what a seokjin who listens to the company even looks like. except that’s apparently who is standing in front of him right now and he’s gray and he’s not smiling and even his hair looks lank and jungkook hates himself, he despises himself, because he still even now just wants to hold seokjin close and take him back to bed. he just wants to hold him, be next to him, do anything seokjin wants of him, anything at all to make this somehow better. but he’s what made it this way in the first place. he’s why everything is ruined. 

seokjin takes a long breath, sighs so deep that it settles in his chest, a tripped up sound like a hiccup and his eyes are wet and jungkook doesn’t know what to do. 

he climbs down off the table and walks up to seokjin until he’s standing right in front of him, but he can do this right, he can handle some friendship 101 level damage control at least, so he doesn’t touch seokjin, confines himself to reaching out and tugging the sleeve of seokjin’s sweater between his thumb and forefinger and nothing more. nothing more ever again, for jungkook. 

“i’m sorry, hyung. i’m sorry that i - that i don’t know how to change. i want to be better for you and i’ll do it, i’ll figure it out i promise, hyung. but it’s taking too long. i’m too slow and i made everything bad and -” 

seokjin steps forward and cups jungkook’s face in one hand. he looks at him, really looks at him properly for the first time in days, weeks maybe. he still looks like he’s about to cry and jungkook has hardly ever seen seokjin cry. seokjin must cry as much as the rest of them do but he’s always tried to hide that, he’s always done a pretty great job of it but now he’s standing in front of jungkook, very carefully touching his face and letting jungkook look at him when he’s on the verge of tears and jungkook just crumbles. every carefully, painstakingly constructed excuse about how he’s going to be okay, how he can survive this, how even though he’s lost seokjin he hasn’t really, he’s still always going to be right there and jungkook hasn’t _lost_ him burns in an instant to ash, to nothing. jungkook has lost seokjin and now he’s full and overflowing with nothing at all, just regret and the terrible knowledge that he did this - that this is what he does to the people he loves. 

“you haven’t done anything wrong, bun,” seokjin tells him, with his eyes still shining, his eyes filling up and jungkook knows he shouldn’t, but he has to bury his face in against seokjin’s chest. seokjin holds him there, holds him close. “none of this is your fault, jungkook,” he says with his mouth pressed to jungkook’s hair and jungkook is crying, now. 

“i love you so much, hyung,” jungkook says into seokjin’s sweater, crying all over him and grabbing onto him, reaching for him and yanking on his clothes, trying to drag him closer somehow because he doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to stand on his own two feet and feel like this. he can’t do this alone. he doesn’t know how to feel so much without seokjin to hold him down, keep him together. he feels like a child, for the first time in a very long time. seokjin is leaving him and he’s so, so lost. “i’m sorry i wrecked everything, i didn’t mean to, i just wanted -” 

“shhh,” seokjin soothes him, petting jungkook’s hair and then gently pulling him back by the shoulders, ducking down a little so he can look into jungkook’s eyes. 

“i know, baby,” he says and jungkook _sobs_ , “it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay,” seokjin promises him and even though everything is different and bad now, even though it’s all over, jungkook still trusts him. still believes everything seokjin tells him because he’s never had to figure out how to do anything else. 

they stand in the middle of the kitchen like that, seokjin letting jungkook cling to him and cry, petting him through it and whispering reassurances into his hair, into his temple, against jungkook’s cheek when he leans in to press a kiss there before he goes. 

“you’re going to be just fine, jungkook-ah,” he says, stepping back and reaching for the handle of his suitcase, his eyes glassy but not wet anymore, “the other hyungs will take care of you now, okay? i need to get away for a little bit. not from you, sweetheart. never from you. i’ll be back soon. hyung loves you, you know that, right?” 

and he does. jungkook does know that. but he’s standing there watching seokjin turn around and walk away from him and that feels like not knowing anything at all. 

jungkook wraps his arms around himself and watches seokjin leave. he holds himself still, tries to stop his own trembling and makes himself watch until seokjin is gone. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/


	3. this night is cold in the kingdom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> seokjin sighs and jungkook revisits his embarrassment levels. seems pretty mortifying to be sitting in seokjin’s lap while seokjin berates him for being too loudly horny on main for him, when you really think about it. which jungkook generally doesn’t, but unfortunately is now.

seokjin is gone for four days. 

jungkook, just to mix it up and keep things fresh, cries in his own bed for a change. it feels appropriate to christen it with his tears, now that he’s in it without seokjin. now that he’s in this alone. 

when he isn’t crying, jungkook sleeps. he sleeps a lot, because it turns out that getting your heart broken and crying yourself near incoherent about it is pretty physically exhausting. 

he’s incredibly grateful for this break in their schedule because it’s the first time since he signed up for this life that he feels like if he needed to, he couldn’t do it. he’s spent so much time performing that sometimes it’s so easy it frightens him, but he is reminded now that some things are too big to play off. some things can’t be covered up by any of the many masks he’s had to collect to hide behind along the way. 

seokjin doesn’t call or text so jungkook doesn’t try to get in touch with him either. maybe if he did call, seokjin would be too busy to answer the phone. maybe his texts would go unanswered and jungkook wouldn’t even know whether that was because seokjin was avoiding him or because seokjin just had better things to do with his time than text jungkook. maybe seokjin has plenty of things to do with his time that make spending time with jungkook feel like a chore. jungkook wouldn’t know, because he hasn’t got a clue what seokjin’s life looks like without jungkook front and center in it, because that’s where jungkook has dug his heels in to stay, all this time. 

the rest of the hyungs check in on jungkook from time to time. jimin and taehyung are off traveling for the short break and the others are still working, always working, but they still make time to pop their heads in and ask if he’s eaten, ask if he’s okay. namjoon messages him so much that some of his lyrics work bleed over into the things he sends jungkook, and it's nice to be on the receiving end of such poetry, but the way namjoon sees and thinks and talks about the world serves to make jungkook's heart hurt a little more; an untimely reminder of the kind of 'what if's that jungkook had previously thought of as his 'one day's, that he now must learn to see as his 'only ever once upon a time.'

he’s not okay and that’s clear to everyone, but he’s working on it and healing begins with self acceptance or some shit. that’s maybe what namjoon said; different variations of it a kind of mosaic that jungkook sometimes struggles to see the bigger picture of. jungkook doesn’t have it down word for word and he doesn't know what the end result looks like yet but he knows he doesn’t want to be a burden to anyone, so he does this by himself. he feels like there’s nothing he could say to any of his hyungs that could foster a conversation that would help him with this. it’s pretty clear to him and them that seokjin has dumped him - or, rather, very kindly made it clear to jungkook that they were never together and never, ever will be. nothing anyone could say would change that. there aren’t any words that will make it okay. 

jungkook listens to a lot of really sad music and lets himself think methodically, lovingly, through all the things he’d wanted for him and seokjin. everything he’d thought they were working towards. everything he was wrong about. it’s the closest he can get to looking through photo albums from a time that now will never come. as much as it’s the worst kind of pain jungkook has ever felt, it’s nice too, to for a moment just let himself believe. to live one last time in hope. 

in the grip of that hope - a wretched, shining gleam of everything, of _forever_ that jungkook wants to chase down; a magpie enthralled by a bright light that calls to him, sings for him and makes him an acting, unthinking thing - jungkook cracks open his laptop and sketches out the bare frame of a song. it sounds like only the bones of something that could have, should have been huge and that feels fitting, because what it’s born to commemorate will now never know life. it is melody lines without words and string sections that sound like they’re cutting into jungkook, brutally cutting parts of him away and they are because this song is what he wants to say but doesn’t know how to. it’s what he needs to remember, though it’s not a pleasant or joyful expression. it’s how he feels. he saves it to his harddrive as ‘undone.mp4’ and laughs at that, bitter at his own misery and amused by the length and breadth of it. 

and then, when he’s exhausted his own imagination and cried it all out, jungkook packs it away. sorts it through and puts it aside, because it’s not his to have anymore. not even secretly. not even only hopefully. 

it’s gonna be a long time before he’s completely himself again and he honestly doesn’t know if he’ll ever get all the way over it but he’s determined to try. all he can do is try. 

so he gets up and throws the curtains open. he collects every snotty, tear-soaked tissue he can find and as many empty water bottles as he can carry and takes the garbage out. he cleans his and seokjin’s room and changes the sheets and then he accidentally falls into the zone and cleans the whole apartment, knocks politely on his hyung’s bedroom doors and asks if they need their floors vacuumed, laughs when yoongi looks at the vacuum in his hand like he doesn’t know what it is. 

it sucks, honestly, but doing something is better than doing nothing and jungkook just wants to survive this. he just wants things to go back to being even kind of like they used to be, even if they’ll never be the same again. 

by the time seokjin gets back, bursting into the apartment wearing a pastel pink sweat suit and smiling, grinning actually, bouncing back into their lives like he’s brought the sun itself and jungkook’s ability to function with him, jungkook has succeeded in numbing himself. some. sort of. to an extent. 

he looks at seokjin and is still completely bowled over by him, still feels like the wind has been knocked out of him when seokjin smiles at him, still looks at seokjin in his stupid adorable soft looking clothes and just wants to nap with him forever, but he doesn’t cry, doesn’t beg seokjin to take him back and that feels like enough, for now. 

“hyung missed you,” seokjin tells him, smiling at him the way he used to - smiling like he means it - and that can be enough for jungkook. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

that night, seokjin doesn’t sleep in their bed. 

he unpacks his stuff into their room; puts everything back where it always went and slides his suitcase into the space left for it in the bottom of their wardrobe, right next to jungkook’s. but when bedtime comes around he’s nowhere to be found. 

jungkook lies awake for hours, wondering where seokjin is, wondering which of the hyung’s bed’s he’s gone to seek solace in, wondering if this is what seokjin felt on the nights when jungkook disappeared to look for answers between someone else’s sheets. 

he thinks about what it would be like to lie here and know that seokjin was staying somewhere outside of their apartment. maybe looking for something more than just answers between the sheets of total strangers. it’s purely self preservation, because jungkook’s going to have to deal with it eventually. if seokjin hasn’t been pursuing relationships and that’s not because he was in love with jungkook like he had so stupidly hoped, then it’s probably because of who they are and what their lives are like. and that’s going to change eventually. jungkook will at some point have to see seokjin find happiness with someone else. 

the idea of it is both terrifying and confusing at once. he doesn’t know what a seokjin who isn’t his - significantly, if not completely - looks like. he doesn’t want to know what a seokjin who looks at someone else and smiles bigger, smiles brighter for them than he does for jungkook would look like, either. he’s going to have to practice if he’s expected to survive it. 

jungkook sleeps fitfully, when sleep finally comes. he has nightmares that he can only remember in moments of heart hammering fear, flashes of light and the snatching snap of teeth, a bite of claws that sing, bloody and triumphant. things too terrible to make sense to his conscious mind. 

he is sitting up in bed, absentmindedly brushing his fingers through his hair, sifting through the tangles that his dreams have left him with and staring off into space, blank both inside and out when seokjin pushes the door open slowly, quietly. 

this is probably where jungkook is supposed to make some kind of joke, say something that will make seokjin laugh and tease him right back, because that’s what they used to do, that’s how they used to be. but they’re not that anymore and jungkook doesn’t know yet what they are now so he just looks at seokjin. he lets seokjin decide. he sits still and lets his mouth stay empty. seokjin looms in the doorway, tall and beautiful and solid and uncertain. he looks like he could hold the world up if he had to, like he doesn’t know why he would have to, but he still would and it’s better that jungkook doesn’t have to say anything because if he did he would say that he wants to be what holds seokjin up. he would beg to be let hold seokjin any way he can. 

“don’t look at me like that,” seokjin says, but it’s light. he’s trying to pretend that everything is normal. “oh, what? you’re the only allowed to play goldilocks with the beds in this house?” 

jungkook blinks. he hadn’t known for sure that seokjin had noticed him getting out of their bed in the middle of the night to go get his fingers sticky with his hyung’s thoughts. he hadn’t thought seokjin would care. 

“no. you can play goldilocks too, hyung. so long as you always come back here, after.” 

he doesn’t say ‘come back to me.’ he’s already excelling at this life-after-love shit. cher sunbaenim would be so proud of him. 

seokjin comes to sit at the end of the bed and even that alone is pretty lit, but then he half turns around and flaps a hand at jungkook, beckons him to him. jungkook sits very still and very deliberately does not think about anything at all for a moment and then he decides fuck it, you only live once, so he crawls down the bed and lets himself fall into seokjin’s lap because seokjin invited him there and it’s just the two of them here so jungkook can’t accidentally go feral and hurt someone else in his single minded pursuit of getting seokjin all over him right now, so this is okay, this must be okay, he’s going to be okay, they’re both okay. 

seokjin gets him arranged the way he wants in his lap, gets jungkook sitting sideways with his butt between seokjin’s thighs so seokjin can put one hand underneath his knees and his other arm low around jungkook’s back to bounce him like he’s weightless. 

“jeon jungkook,” seokjin says, holding jungkook in his arms like he’s a six foot tall, pretty significantly muscled baby. which he is, how nice of seokjin to notice, “are you in the headspace to have a discussion that may necessitate some emotional understanding and verbal sharing on your part?” 

he holds jungkook with just one arm then, supports his back with it and lets jungkook’s feet fall to rest on the bed by seokjin’s thigh so he can lift a hand to brush jungkook’s hair back out of his face. they’re both just wearing boxers and tshirts and seokjin is all hard angles and soft, still sleep-warm skin, all first-thing-in-the-morning beautiful, still (always) jungkook’s favourite place to be. jungkook is pretty sure he could do anything at all seokjin asked of him, if it meant getting to sit here like this, with seokjin under him and over him and all around him, holding him and touching him, looking only at him. 

“are we gonna talk about our feelings now, hyung?” jungkook had seen this coming. he’d known it was going to have to happen before they can both properly move on. he’s not scared of his feelings. embarrassed by them, maybe, if only because seokjin doesn’t share them, but whatever. he can put his big boy pants on while his hyung cradles him gently to his chest if he absolutely must. the bouncing helps. 

“you understand what happened, right? you know why i had to talk to you after the thing with hobi, yeah?” 

jungkook just nods, sullen, but only because he’s mad at himself. he’s pouting, but only because he knows he fucked up big time. 

“do you know why hyung had to go home for a while?” 

this time seokjin seems determined to hold out for an actual verbal answer. 

jungkook keeps pouting, but perseveres and speaks through it. park jimin isn’t one of his role models for nothing. 

“because i made you uncomfortable by talking about how much i wanted you to ream me and getting jealous when the hyungs wanted to touch you too?” 

the fact that it comes out as a question is just an ode to talking in pout as a genre. jungkook knows what he did wrong. he knows there’s no actual question of that at all. 

seokjin sighs and jungkook revisits his embarrassment levels. seems pretty mortifying to be sitting in seokjin’s lap while seokjin berates him for being too loudly horny on main for him, when you really think about it. which jungkook generally doesn’t, but unfortunately is now. 

“it’s not -” seokjin sighs again, “you know that nothing you want is wrong, right? like literally anything you’re into is completely fine, once everyone involved consents and makes careful, informed decisions, yes? we don’t kink shame in this household, jeon jungkook.” 

which, right. 

“right, hyung,” duh, “but isn’t that why you left? because you were grossed out? and mad at me for tackling hobi hyung off you and almost breaking him?” 

jungkook is confused and not not horny. as an overall means of existence but also especially, right now. 

“The Hobi Incident” seokjin begins and jungkook’s not _not_ imminent boner-in-progress wilts a little at the capital letters. he wishes he could be into punctuation and proper spelling and grammar and shit the same way namjoon is (sexually) but he’s gen z through and through and capital letters will always be instant vibe killers for him. “The Hobi Incident was definitely a problem. and i’m complicit in it, because i don’t ask you to be gentle with me so of course you’re going to slip up and forget to be gentle with the others too. but the other thing …” seokjin trails off and looks away, hugs jungkook to him tighter after a moment’s pause like he’s the one that needs that comfort and jungkook’s heart does something big and dumb in his chest. “the other thing isn’t a problem. you can be honest about what you want, jungkook. hyung’s just sorry he can’t give it to you, but you understand why that’s the case, right?” 

jungkook nods. it’s because seokjin thinks he’s gross. 

he’s come to terms with that part. sort of. slightly? it hadn’t been hard to understand that seokjin doesn’t find him sexually appealing, because duh, just look at seokjin. jungkook might be hot but of course he isn’t hot enough to ping someone like seokjin’s radar. seokjin is basically a god and jungkook is just a baby disaster gay that kills time in the gym sometimes and doesn’t look half bad after a good scrubbing and some professionally applied eyeliner. turns out that that doesn’t count for much, though and at long last jungkook has maybe finally learned the lesson (which he previously thought of as some kind of especially horrible urban legend) that in fact, he can’t have everything he wants. and no, not even if he really, really wants it. 

it had been kind of complicated, making the reality that seokjin doesn’t want him and never has make sense alongside the patterns of their relationship so far; the nature of their closeness. the only way it really lines up for jungkook is if he reasons that seokjin has all this time thought of him in a way so far removed from anything even close to sexual that it wasn’t confusing or difficult for him to let those lines blur sometimes between them. if jungkook looks back through their every day and night together and factors in the now readily apparent truth that seokjin never saw him as anything but his friend, never wanted him in any way more, then the numbers fall out right. 

which; agonizing. 

but jungkook finds himself in a brand new sphere of existence now where he’s heartbroken because he’ll never get to love seokjin or be loved by him the way he wants, but is still somehow so wholly and totally into him that he still constantly thinks about getting to bang him, even when he’s sobbing himself to sleep over the loss of him. and that probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone who isn’t him, so who is he to judge someone else’s romantic and sexual experiences of attraction? 

human sexuality is a spectrum and all that, as yoongi has drilled into them all while preening at the approving looks namjoon gives him. 

so jungkook can accept, he supposes, begrudgingly, that seokjin finds his physical form deplorable, though that reality is agonizing for sure. 

agonizing doesn’t trump respecting seokjin’s truth and if jungkook can’t have love then at least he can have reason and mutual respect, right? namjoon has spoken on the value of inherently respecting people based on nothing beyond their existing at length and for years now. true, jungkook usually tunes him out right around hour two or so of this particular talk, but if it works for namjoon - and apparently yoongi too, if jungkook’s nocturnal adventures have turned up anything of note - then there must be something to say for it. maybe there’s a lot to be said for it, actually and maybe jungkook should find out what the script of reason actually reads like. namjoon is hot and smart and capable and has clean sheets. yoongi is hot and smart and vicious in a way that’s also pretty hot and he’s beyond fucking adorable in footie pajamas. maybe they need a big relatively hot and respectful baby gay to round out their arrangement. jungkook is going to feel them out by feeling them up via a soft cuddle campaign and see where things go from there. 

as soon as he’s finished verbally ending his previous relationship, y’know - the one he was never actually in. 

“yes hyung, i understand,” jungkook says, like the very good and low-maintenance boy that he is trying to be, because what else can he say, really. “so - we -” it’s still hard to get the wording right, to have to try and think about things before he says them to seokjin, now, “i don’t have to move back into my room?” 

jungkook isn’t entirely confident that seokjin isn’t going to say that he should. he’s walking a tightrope here between being the very person that presents the idea of getting rid of him to seokjin and needing to know that he doesn’t have to constantly worry that seokjin is about to kick him out of their bed. 

“silly,” seokjin scolds him, picking his legs up with one arm banded under jungkook’s thighs and lifting him, folding him up a little smaller and bouncing him in his arms before dropping him gently back down into his own lap, “this _is_ your room. our room.” 

“cool,” jungkook says, smiling and smug even in the face of all but total defeat. 

because he has - accidentally, obviously - learned a very important lesson from all of this and that’s this: having seokjin somehow, in some ways, will always trump not having him at all. 

for a quick sec jungkook was absolutely ready to risk it all for a shot at making his body a walking home for seokjin’s dick, but a) he’s matured past that now and b) who the fuck wouldn’t, honestly. 

but seokjin is still here, still holding jungkook tight, still letting him hold on tight to this - to them. 

and jungkook can work with that. 

“the voring thing, though,” seokjin interrupts, “that was hyperbole, right? because i looked it up when i was back home and i don’t know if that’s something you should be -” 

“i was kidding, hyung,” jungkook reassures him, trying not to laugh at how seokjin is looking down at their bodies, overlapping the way they always should be, as if he’s trying to imagine how he might digest jungkook. 

“you spend too much time on the dark web,” seokjin decides, frowning. he refers to any website that hosts anime content as ‘the dark web’ and it’s ridiculous and jungkook is so, so very much in love. “watch more porn or something. but the normal kind. and not in the living room.” 

“yes, hyung,” jungkook agrees easily, because everything feels easy when he’s like this; cradled in seokjin’s arms, held tight to his chest. 

“the other stuff,” seokjin says hesitantly, sounding unsure in a way that’s brand new to jungkook, because it’s a note to seokjin’s tone that he has heard before, but never directed at him, “did you mean that?” 

it takes jungkook a minute to figure out what he’s asking. jungkook kind of says a lot around seokjin, asks him for tons of stuff, screams about him almost always in his own head and jungkook sometimes isn’t the best at keeping all that contained inside his lizard brain. 

“you mean like … about wanting you? wanting to be under you always?” the super cool (read: absolutely fucking horrific) thing about jungkook’s traitorous memory is that when he gets really wasted, his memory pretends to take the night off and check out, only to arrive for work the next morning armed with a sheaf of still printer-warm and freshly laminated highlights from when jungkook had most brought shame upon himself and his ancestors the night before. he remembers everything, which is just not in keeping with his goal to remember only the nice things. 

“yeah,” seokjin confirms, frowning, picking at a fraying thread on the sleeve of jungkook’s shirt like he’s the one that’s nervous, here, “... that. did you mean it?” 

“well. yeah,” jungkook is pretty sure he’s allowed to say that. he’s pretty sure seokjin said it was okay for him to want him, once he knows he’ll never have him. but maybe he should make sure, because this feels like something that having any miscommunication on would be potentially fucking disatrous for them. “is that … okay?” 

seokjin laughs and jungkook’s next breath comes a little easier. 

“no, jungkook. i’m unspeakably offended that someone might dare to find me physically attractive. i don’t know how i’ll ever recover from this grave injustice. years of therapy, probably. maybe some slam poetry. a voodoo doll?” he theatrically scans jungkook from head to toe, narrows his eyes at him like he’s making mental calculations “do you think you can buy oversized supreme shirts for ken dolls, or am i going to have to get some custom made?” 

“a ken doll?” jungkook has to ask, aghast, because: rude. 

“unless you’re planning on going on a starvation diet soon,” seokjin lets the hand he has around jungkook’s back settle into the space between his shoulder blades, his palm so big and warm through the thin material of jungkook’s shirt. “but don’t, because hyung will be very upset with you if you do. not that hyung isn’t already upset that you’re too big to take over my knee, now, but i’ve come to terms with that. it took a lot of therapy and some badly composed but passionately performed slam poetry, but i’m okay with you being my giant baby, so don’t change on me now, okay? that’s an order.” 

seokjin loops his arms all the way around jungkook, even though he has to squish jungkook’s knees up into his chest to make his hands meet. jungkook doesn’t mind, not at all. even if he did, that would change when seokjin leans in close so he can put his head on jungkook’s shoulder, his nose pressed into jungkook’s neck. 

“don’t go anywhere on me, okay?” he asks, so quiet that jungkook feels it more than he hears it, the hum of words against his skin, seokjin’s breath making him shiver all over. 

“m’never going anywhere where you’re not,” jungkook says and he wants so badly to turn his head, to turn his face and find seokjin’s mouth with his own. 

“gonna stay right here with you, hyung,” he says and closes his eyes and bites at the inside of his lip so hard that he tastes the hot tang of iron, blood in his mouth. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

the first time jungkook had ever seriously questioned the choices of the rest of the hyungs had been about a week into this whole thing and it had been because he’d looked at seokjin, sitting cross-legged in the corner of a dance studio, brushing his still summer-sweaty hair out of his eyes with one hand and holding a script he was reading in the other and realized that literally no one else in the room was turned in his direction. 

he’d looked away from seokjin ready to meet the eyes of several other people and exchange a friendly ‘are you seeing this shit bro’ look that would then helpfully alert jungkook to who exactly he had to defeat in order to be the one to claim seokjin’s hand in marriage and he’d found not a single other person going through it as much as he had been, even then. 

and he’d had two thoughts, then, which occurred to him in this order: 

‘cool, less imminent bloodshed than i had feared necessary’ 

followed immediately by 

‘but damn, people really live like this? not looking at kim seokjin every chance they get? not being absolutely shook to the very core of themselves by his whole everything, but his big ass personal jungle gym frame specifically?’ 

jungkook had been admittedly very young then; like basically just an amoeba in a backwards snapback so he’d known he wasn’t the most emotionally or like, in any other way mature person in the room, but even then, as small and underdeveloped as he was, he’d had the good sense - the innate gift, maybe - to know that seokjin was out of this fucking world. even other people he looked at after he looked at seokjin seemed hotter by pure proxy. 

and sure, that had lead to a real weird week where seokjin and namjoon had been joined at the hip almost constantly for adulting reasons or whatever and jungkook couldn’t actually figure out for a hot sec there which one of them he wanted to walk him down the aisle and which one of them he wanted to be waiting at the end of it, but he was just a boy, then and if he still sometimes thinks about holding namjoon’s hand while he sucks seokjin’s dick well then god fucking damn it he’s still just a boy sleeping every night beside another boy, silently begging to be permitted to suckle gently at his nips. 

jungkook has been silently begging for years now. 

he’d only had a few weeks of thinking maybe he was allowed to beg out loud, at last. 

and now he knows that in fact, he does have permission to beg out loud, he just can’t hope that his pleas will be answered. 

it’s confusing. 

but for a solid week in there, it had been utterly fucking devastating and jungkook will take confusing over that any day. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

taehyung likes to both think and claim that this practice is an integral part of his and seokjin’s acting training. 

but they all know that it’s just an excuse to guilt trip the rest of them into watching dramas with him because seokjin has actual acting training already and taehyung requires an audience at all times if possible but especially when he is exaggeratedly re-enacting his favourite scenes from movies and tv shows. 

still, jungkook is here because seokjin is here and everyone else is here because of whatever fucked up choices they’ve made in this life or the last to lead them to this fate. 

“if i make popcorn are you going to bitch about the way people chew?” jimin asks but jungkook doesn’t know why he bothers. this always goes down the same way - taehyung tells jimin not to snack so loudly, jimin does it anyway, taehyung bitches, jimin says something mean, taehyung gets turned on and then they have to up the volume on the tv to cover the sounds of taehyung and jimin making out. 

jungkook reaches for the remote and wonders if he’d get away with sitting next to seokjin or if he should just cut his losses and give himself a break and sit with a rapper instead because god knows he’s not going anywhere near any piece of furniture that vmin are in the vicinity of. 

in the end he settles in between namjoon and yoongi and congratulates himself on a choice well made when yoongi tugs one of jungkook’s hands into his lap to play with his fingers and namjoon throws his arm around jungkook’s shoulders, encourages him to snuggle up into his side. 

jungkook is still basking in the comfort, the warm domesticity of it all, when an argument breaks out over the relative merits of the stupid confession scene that’s playing out on the screen. 

“after all that effort. he must have spent weeks planning everything! and now it’s ruined.” jungkook can hear taehyung’s lip wobble. 

“he didn’t even set it up himself, how much can he really have meant it? plus he’s liked her for like five minutes. and also, they’re comic book characters, they can’t even make choices for themselves.” hoseok is a romantic and he makes no secret of that but he makes even less of a secret of the fact that he just lives to watch the world burn. chaos is his comfort state. 

sure enough, taehyung is up and throwing cushions and demanding that hoseok helps him act out a better, more authentic feeling scenario if he’s so much better at big gestures, if he thinks he can put his money where his mouth is etc. 

jungkook is warm and comfortable and it’s not like he’s ever not sleepy so he’s thinking hopefully about an impending nap, safe and snug in the arms of his beloved hyungs when seokjin speaks up, quiet from the other couch. 

“it was kind of sweet though. the execution was pretty juvenile but they are just kids. and you can’t go wrong with flowers and banners. i think it’s romantic.” 

jungkook snorts before he can help himself. 

he’d leave it at that because he doesn’t exactly love talking about his thoughts on romance at the best of times but he’s pretty sure it’s been made extra brutally clear very very recently that jungkook is not the person to go to for relationship advice. he sucks at even basic friendship, apparently. 

he feels eyes on him, though and then namjoon makes a questioning sound and jungkook never learned how not to fill a space namjoon makes the point of clearing for him in conversation. he skipped over that part of his formative learning to watch anime and devote his life to blindly, faithfully following namjoon’s every lead instead. 

“well it’s just,” he flounders, but tries again, “dumb?” yes, perfect. so very well said, jeon jungkook, it must be abundantly clear to all who are gathered here today that those writing workshops with namjoon are coming along swimmingly. shakespeare who? isn’t that that guy who copied from jungkook in creative lit class? 

“is it?” seokjin asks and he sounds like he doesn’t know, which is also dumb, because he’s the one who said he liked the idea of all of this. being wooed or whatever. big romantic gestures. someone’s probably going to propose to him in a hot air balloon one day. there will be a flock of doves and maybe some sky writing. he’ll probably cry. seokjin is a beautiful crier. 

“romance is stupid,” jungkook decides. he feels very strongly about this, all of a sudden. “if you love someone you should just tell them. like what’s the point in not saying it? or waiting for some arbitrary day or thinking you need to say it a certain way? why dress it up? it is what it is.” 

“spoken like a kid who thinks ‘confession’ is just an old fashioned way of saying ‘slid into the dms,’” yoongi says and namjoon’s chest rumbles with laughter. jungkook snuggles closer, seeks more comfort than he is currently receiving because that, he finds, is now no longer enough. 

“if i was in love,” jungkook says and he pauses for a second, lets himself think about a world where things are exactly the way they are here but not. where there’s him and there’s seokjin and there’s bangtan but maybe they’re not exactly bangtan or maybe the world itself is what’s different, but it is different and that makes it better. that would make it easier. “i’d tell them all the time. i’d tell them every day. i’d dm it to them, say it to their face, write it in the steam on the bathroom mirror. i’d shout it from the fucking rooftops.” 

yoongi’s hands go still around jungkook’s fingers, just holding onto him, his grip tight. 

“you don’t need flowers to say something that the person you love should already know. if you really love them. if you love them right.” jungkook’s still thinking about a slightly altered reality; maybe not even a different place but a different time. here, but before. here, if there was a time when jungkook could have said something or done something to make seokjin see him and know him and love him. 

“that sounds nice, kook,” seokjin says and he sounds as far away as jungkook feels. 

yoongi goes back to playing with jungkook’s fingers and namjoon tilts his head to rest against the top of jungkook’s and then hoseok and taehyung collapse in a heap in the middle of the floor, giggling and pretending to fend off one another’s attempts to act out a “meaningful” kiss and jimin is yelling at everyone to shut up and the drama is back from break and seokjin doesn’t say anything else and no one else does either. 

they all go to bed not long after and seokjin is quiet as they get changed, quiet as they slide beneath the covers. 

seokjin feels as far away as he’d sounded. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

once upon a time in the latter formative years of one jeon jungkook, there had been this one especially confusing period in jungkook’s then still-young life. 

it had been back toward the almost end of the beginning of bts, when jungkook had most keenly felt the age gap between himself and the rest of them. taehyung and jimin were barely older than him, but they weren’t the maknae - the baby - and he was and that had for a while felt like a line in the sand that jungkook didn’t know how to cross. 

he’d realized right around then that he wasn’t interested in girls, even though ‘war of hormone’ honestly could have been the absolutely accurate title of his autobiography if he’d written one at that point. 

it had been during those dark days when seokjin had been fooling around with someone who was infuriatingly not jungkook, an ex trainee who had been dropped from big hit but was at another company now and still wanted to spend time with seokjin for some reason that jungkook didn’t understand or like and jungkook had felt some type of way about it and jungkook had started looking at other boys and thinking ‘you know what - maybe’ and in a fit of something like teenage rebellion, something like sheer, absolute masochism, jungkook had decided to test the waters. 

it hadn’t been hard to find people who wanted to touch him back then - jungkook doesn’t know when that changed or what has happened since to make him summarily unappealing en masse, but worse still, to seokjin - and with the help of a couple of his classmates, some dancers at the company and notably, a senior idol, jungkook had figured some shit out. 

the cliff notes: sex stuff was fine. it was never really great, but it sometimes made something loosen in him, made him feel better in a way that was not bad. it hadn’t been anything serious, just kissing (which jungkook did not much enjoy) and handjobs (which jungkook did enjoy but in a way that felt very impersonal, very automatic, almost) and blowjobs (which jungkook did not enjoy receiving but did enjoy giving, sometimes very much) and some very tentative fingering (this, jungkook was happy to do both to himself and others, but he could not comfortably trust to anyone else.) it was fine. it felt necessary. 

but after. 

very shortly after he’d curated these notes and concluded his brief period of exploration as having been informative but now resolutely concluded, jungkook had learned something much more important. 

he hadn’t had to do anything to figure it out. it had been a kind of realization that seemed to just wash over him, apropos of absolutely nothing. unsought and unannounced but undeniable. 

he’d looked at seokjin one day and that wasn’t unusual because jungkook was always looking at seokjin, but that day jungkook had looked at seokjin and something inside of him had broken open, broken loose with such an aching pang of _want_ that jungkook knew. 

and now jungkook can’t unknow. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

a week after jimin and taehyung get back from their travels, when everyone is back together again and somewhat, in some ways settled, they pull jungkook into jimin’s room to “debrief,” whatever the fuck that means. 

turns out, it means getting wine drunk and talking shit about their bandmates. 

“so hyung line are officially in my bad books now,” jimin is saying, sitting on the floor with his back against the bed and taehyung lying between his legs. “we must have sent them a thousand messages and they responded like four times. assholes.” 

jungkook is lying on his back on the carpet, pleasantly tipsy to the point where he feels maybe kind of blurry around the edges, but knows that if he drinks anymore he’s going to start crying. 

“it was fine, jimin. m’fine. they checked on me tons. and namjoon messsaged me constantly.” 

jimin frowns. 

"and yet, not even having the leader of the maknaes to show them how it's done made the hyungs follow suit. typical, honestly. sometimes i wonder what their lives would be like if they didn't have the four of us to socialize them."

jimin has some interesting ideas on who does what for whom, in this group. jungkook knows that the maknae line is bts' battery, but the hyungs direct that energy to the places it needs to go. neither of them could work well without the other. jimin's right that seokjin, yoongi and hoseok couldn't achieve what they have without the maknaes, but jungkook also knows that he and vmin and namjoon would probably have spent their creative drive and squandered their chaotic energy for nothing, if it wasn't for their hyungs.

"they did what we needed them to do. they always do, hyung. even if it's not what we want them to do." nobody knows this better than someone who is in love with one of said hyungs. better than jungkook; who can't remember what it's like to not be in love with seokjin. so what if that's gonna spell his miserable end now, probably? what's done is done and it's no-one's fault but jungkook's.

taehyung and jimin both look sceptical, but fuck them, jungkook is _fine_. he’s thriving. he’s in the prime of his life and so what if he’s gonna be alone forever now, that doesn’t even matter a little bit. love is for suckers, anyway. maybe jungkook will just go on a sexy rampage, some kind of epic dick adventure. it’ll be like his poorly planned and thought out solution to having seokjin accidentally trigger jungkook’s awareness of his sexuality, but better. or exponentially worse. one of the two. he could call it ‘muscle twink adventures 2: the dickening.’ he might make a trailer for it later. maybe gcf could have a soft porn offshoot. 

“... not fine,” taehyung is complaining when jungkook’s attention trails back around to the here and now, “we specifically told them they were responsible for feeding and watering you and changing your bedding.” 

“yeah, we’d never have gone away if we hadn’t already had the tickets and stuff booked and also like no sign of a break for the next year,” jimin adds, “leaving you here unattended when you were clearly going the fuck through it was the absolute worst.” 

“what’s that about, anyway? you seem like you’re doing okay now, but namjoon told us you stayed in your room the entire time even though hobi yelled at him for telling. what was going on with you, babe?” only jimin could sit there with the love of his life in his lap and call someone else ‘babe.’ jungkook is dismayed to find that it kind of gets to him. 

“eh, it was nothing. seokjin hyung broke up with me and then went home and came back and re-confirmed that i’m not allowed to be in love with him so we’re not doing that anymore. or -” jungkook squints up at the ceiling and then turns his head to look for the wine bottle, “or we never were doing it at all, actually, i guess. it was just me. and now it’s always going to be just me. it’s fine. i’m coping. i half wrote a terrible song about it. pass the wine, hyung?” 

taehyung sits up so fast he almost headbutts jimin in the chin and scrambles across the carpet to bring jungkook the wine. jimin takes a second to sigh very deeply at the love of his life’s clumsy antics but then he starts to crawl across the floor too. 

“oh, baby,” jimin says, lifting jungkook’s head into his lap and petting at his hair. taehyung is curled up next to jungkook with his head pillowed on jungkook’s thighs and they’re both looking at him like they’re heartbroken too. 

jungkook takes a long swig of wine. 

“hyungs,” he says, very seriously, “would you like to take my virginity?” 

“yes,” taehyung says, starting to sit up until jimin puts his foot on taehyung’s shoulder and pushes him back down. 

“absolutely fucking not,” jimin says, glaring at taehyung and then looking down at jungkook. “but only because that would be a terrible idea.” 

that doesn’t really make jungkook feel any better, though he suspects that jimin is trying to be kind. 

“why does no one in this group want to fuck me?” he wonders out loud. he’d intended for it to come across light; just some cute idle curiosity from noted super adorable baby gay jeon jungkook, but to his horror it sounds as nakedly hurt as he feels. there are so very few people that jungkook finds himself looking at with sexual interest that any pursuit of a relationship is going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack as is. if the people who know him best and love him most don’t want him, then what’s the fucking point? 

“it’s not like that, sweet boy,” jimin says and jungkook watches his eyes trail down to look at jungkook’s mouth for a second, for a fraction of a second before he’s closing his eyes and shaking his head like he’s just seen something he’s trying to knock the memory of right out of his brain. even the thought of just kissing jungkook grosses him out. 

“i’d fuck you right here, right now if jimin would let me,” taehyung adds and that is the nicest thing anyone has said to him in weeks. jungkook smiles down at him, his lovely gorgeous taehyung. still - eternally, maybe - jungkook’s second favourite person in the world. 

“jungkook. baby,” jimin tilts jungkook’s chin back up to make him look at him, “you’ve never wanted to do anything with any of us before. why now? why did you ask us this tonight?” 

“because seokjin hyung doesn’t want me,” jungkook answers immediately, because that’s an easy one. 

“okay, just. even assuming that’s true,” jimin says, which is dumb because they don’t have to assume. jungkook knows. seokjin told him so. “who do _you_ want?” 

and that’s a much harder question to give a response to. not because jungkook doesn’t know the answer, but because he’s pretty sure his hyungs aren’t going to understand. he doesn’t totally understand it himself, even though he knows how he feels. how he’s always felt. 

“i want seokjin hyung,” jungkook says, because that’s all there is to say. he’s only ever wanted seokjin. he can’t even imagine wanting someone else, now. but. “but he doesn’t want me. so why can’t i have sex with people who do want me?” 

it seems like a fairly straight forward line of thought to jungkook. there’s logic for days in that. he’s being rational af. somewhere in the world, namjoon just got a boner he doesn’t understand. 

“you can have sex with whoever you want, bun,” jimin tells him, brushing the pads of his fingers down over jungkook’s nose, letting them trail across his cheekbone and then sweep slow and so soft across his jaw line, “god knows you proved that with your ‘jeon jungkook: the early years; slut edition’ stage, but you have to want to. you shouldn’t just want to be wanted. you deserve more than that, love.” 

jungkook takes another tiny sip of wine, just to distract himself, just to have something to do. 

“you’re lovely, hyung,” he tells jimin, tipping his head back so he can look at him better, “you love me so well, so much. both of you,” he says, reaching out to touch taehyung wherever his hands can find him, “i should have fallen in love with you two instead.” 

and that’s what it’s come to. falling in love with two of his bandmates would be the simpler solution; the better version of what jungkook is currently battling through. 

never, ever let it be said that jeon jungkook chose the easy option. 

“if nothing has changed in like a year though, get back to us,” taehyung says, turning his head to try and bite at jungkook’s fingers. jimin only laughs. 

“if you ever need _and_ want us, you know where we are,” he says and jungkook feels a little better, still sad and tipsy and aching some, but better, too. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

peace unfolds slowly, tentatively settles like a sweet mist for the boys bangtan. 

there are still moments when it feels like something is about to shatter, when jungkook feels frozen, terrified that he’s going to fall to pieces again. 

but seokjin is here and jungkook is loved and that can be enough.

it has to be enough, because it’s all jungkook has, now. 

everything feels unfamiliar, new somehow when really, nothing actually changes. it’s the same people doing the same things the same way they always have but jungkook is the one that’s stuttering now, missing steps he used to be able to sleep walk across unscathed. everything feels like it requires a level of purpose from jungkook that he’s no longer accustomed to giving and it wears him down sometimes, threatens to wear him out. 

but his hyungs are by his side, always there to hold him up and that’s enough. 

this has to be enough for jungkook. 

this has to be good enough. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

it’s not unusual for jungkook to wake up alone. seokjin has always been an early riser, especially on days when they don’t have an early schedule and he can spend the morning peacefully plodding around the house. 

jungkook stretches out, shaking the sleep from his limbs and reaching for seokjin’s side of the bed, touching the sheets to see how long he’s been gone. they’re still warm under his hands and jungkook smiles, tumbles right off the bed and onto his feet to go follow his hyung. 

as he approaches the kitchen, though, he hears multiple voices and that makes him pause in the hallway. 

“.... asked taehyung and jimin to have sex with him, seokjin!” 

jungkook gasps and quickly puts his hand over his own mouth. he doesn’t know what kind of fucked up alternate reality he woke up in today, but if yoongi isn’t using honorifics with seokjin then jungkook does not want to spend a single second longer here. 

“they’re good kids, but do you have any idea how excruciating that has to have been for them?” 

when it became the universal standard that sleeping with jungkook was the worst fate to befall a human being, jungkook doesn’t know. rude _and_ hurtful. 

“they’re not kids, yoongi,” seokjin says, his voice low like he’s not really paying attention. jungkook can hear the hiss of the pan, so he must be cooking breakfast. “they’re adults, all of them. they can do whatever they want.” 

it sounds like seokjin doesn’t care what they do and jungkook knew that already, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less to hear him actually say it. 

“if you don’t do something about this, hyung ...” yoongi says but doesn’t finish that sentence. jungkook kind of wants to know what yoongi thinks is going to happen, because jungkook himself doesn’t have a fucking clue and he is more than open to suggestions at this point. 

“you know i can’t, yoongi,” seokjin sounds distracted. he sounds tired and bored. “you know why i can’t.” 

jungkook turns and goes back to his room, closes the door behind him. 

he looks at their bed, still unmade and inviting and knows that if he gets back in there he might not ever be able to make himself get back out. 

he showers and gets dressed and goes to the gym, instead. 

he politely refuses seokjin’s offer of food. working out on an empty stomach is good for you, he read somewhere. 

maybe it’s not good for jungkook, though, because for the whole rest of the day he feels sick. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

they all have pretty vastly differing styles; tastes and phases that change drastically and often over the years. 

jimin has probably traversed the spectrum of style in its entirety, going from muscle tees and studded belts and stylized snapbacks to soft cropped sweaters, floral patterned leggings when they’re at home, pastel tones when he feels like it but all black when he wants to remind himself or anyone who might have forgotten that there’s an edge to him, that’s he got depths. 

taehyung has always worn whatever the fuck he wants and he always looks incredible, probably thanks in no small part to how he really just does not give a shit about what anyone has to say about what he wears or how he looks. 

namjoon thinks a lot about what his clothes say, sometimes, except for when what he wants them to say is ‘i’m comfortable, the end.’ 

yoongi thought too much about what his clothes said, once upon a time and now it’s like he’s trying to make up for that by assigning no meaning to how he looks at all. jungkook loves that for him. 

jungkook doesn’t love most of the stuff hoseok chooses to hang on his frame but the things he does love, he loves enough to commit to stealing. hoseok dresses like he just landed on earth and still doesn’t quite understand the function or purpose of clothes yet and that’s probably because hoseok’s ideas on those things are pretty fucking wildly different to everyone else’s and that’s incredibly cool, if you ask jungkook. 

seokjin likes to say that he could wear a garbage bag and still go viral for his face alone and jungkook knows that he says things like that to make people laugh. generally, they do laugh, but no one actually disagrees with him and jungkook doesn’t know for sure if seokjin realizes that no matter what he’s wearing he really is the most beautiful person in the room. every single time. in any room. in every room he walks into. 

none of them ever really have too big an issue with what their stylists try to dress them up in, but jungkook doesn’t think he’s ever heard seokjin ask for something different or even express an opinion when given an option. jungkook doesn’t know if that’s because seokjin thinks he doesn’t know what’s going to look best on him or because he really doesn’t care himself. it’s never an issue, because seokjin always looks incredible. 

but he looks the happiest when he’s dressed comfortably. when the others are pushing at each other to get one last look in at the mirror before they pile into cars for the airport and seokjin can just sit back in his big comfy varsity jacket and smile fondly at their antics. when jimin is dropped low in a squat to make sure his pants aren’t about to rip on stage during rehearsal and seokjin is sitting cross legged on the floor, like a tall pastel puddle in a soft and matching track suit that even jungkook wants to crawl onto, wants to live inside, with him. 

seokjin is always the brightest thing in any room he’s in, he’s true north whenever jungkook is the one holding the compass, but when he’s comfortable in his own skin and happy and at ease, he looks like home. he looks like a door jungkook wants to walk up to and then disappear behind. he’s reprieve. he is shelter. 

seokjin is jungkook’s sanctuary. 

and jungkook doesn’t know how to make himself look like peace and quiet to seokjin, because that’s never the same thing, there’s never just one way. 

sometimes it’s being as loud and obnoxious as he possibly can; becoming a beacon of noise and wide, huge gesture until all seokjin can see is him, until he’s drawn in so jungkook can guide him safely to shore. 

sometimes it’s orbiting him without getting too close or staying too long. flitting in and out of his space with light but constant touches, careful hints of the familiar that ground him without making him feel tied down. 

sometimes it’s making seokjin come seek him out. giving him a task to distract and quiet his mind and then rewarding his efforts with jungkook as his prize; jungkook’s open, waiting arms to fall into and hold onto. 

what seokjin needs isn’t just one thing and it still hasn’t settled yet; the list grows and changes every day. 

and jungkook thinks he could happily spend the rest of his life changing and growing with it. 

loving seokjin makes jungkook different anyway, in every way. being in love with seokjin is growing always, getting better at seokjin and becoming better because of that. 

how jungkook looks on the outside - how he dresses up who he is - has changed a hundred times in a hundred different ways. it’ll change a hundred times more, because every day jungkook feels like someone who is a little bit different to who he was the day before, every day he grows to fit a shoe or shirt that yesterday would have been wrong for the frame of who he had been, then. 

but on the inside, in the center of it all, at the heart of who he is, jungkook is the same. 

different around the edges, growing out to fill more space, fitting in in new places in brand new ways. 

jungkook grows for seokjin, guided and strengthened, fed and nourished by all of his hyungs. 

but jungkook grows _for_ seokjin. 

loving seokjin means changing and jungkook never wants to get stagnant, always wants to know that he can grow and become more. he was like that before he met seokjin and knowing seokjin only gives him a new focus for who he already was, who he was always bound to be. 

even with this one avenue of how he grew for seokjin - growing to love him, learning how to be big enough to have the room he needed to house how very much it had been to be in love with seokjin, being and staying and becoming ever moreso the kind of person seokjin could be proud to be in love with - gone now, pruned away and still aching, bleeding still, a phantom anguish that shouldn’t hurt anymore because it was gone now, it was never destined to bloom at all, jungkook is still _more_ because of seokjin and he will be that way still. he’ll keep growing for seokjin, if only to know him better now, to love him more in different ways, in other ways because this one way was gone but the absence of it in jungkook only really left him space to fill in with something else and everything he was was for seokjin in some way, somehow, anyway. 

seokjin is still here. he’s always going to be here for jungkook, in the deepest parts of him, in his favourite places, the best part of him even now. 

so jungkook will change. 

he’s always been changing for seokjin. 

jungkook can keep changing. 

jungkook can do anything, if it’s for seokjin. 

jungkook will do whatever he has to, to keep seokjin. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

one of the biggest adjustments for jungkook is suddenly finding himself with all this free time on his hands. 

it’s not like their utterly insane schedule just stops or anything, but even when you’re busy all day long, all week long, for months on end, there are a lot of periods of downtime scattered throughout. 

before, jungkook didn’t have to think of ways to entertain himself or try to find stuff to do to keep busy, to stay awake, to quiet his racing mind. before, all of that had been simple because seokjin had been the answer to it all. wherever he was, jungkook was too and then there was something to talk about at, someone to look at, somewhere to just be because none of the specifics of that mattered when he was doing all of it with seokjin. 

jungkook had gravitated toward seokjin like their trajectories were locked long before he’d fallen in love with him, so in theory he thinks that means he’d be forgiven for still trying to be always wherever seokjin was, even now, but jungkook is trying to grow past being content with what he merely might get away with now that that’s not the only real direction he tries to apply to his life. he’s trying to be about what he wants to be and that’s still always somehow something to do with seokjin, but he’s trying not to see himself only in terms of what seokjin will allow or might want anymore. he’s trying to breathe life into parts of himself that didn’t seem important before, because they were just potential branches of who he could be and feeding them would mean redirecting the energy supply from the sure and sturdy trunks of who he was and would be for seokjin. 

he needs to learn how to be himself when he’s not with seokjin, how to not think of himself as half of a larger whole even when seokjin isn’t around. 

for the first time, jungkook has to stand alone and it feels a lot like learning how to walk must have. 

“are you teething?” jungkook is lying curled up inside the smaller bracket of yoongi’s body. he hadn’t noticed he was doing it until yoongi speaking had startled him out of his mindless reverie, but now that he’s paying attention he realizes that he has tugged the neckline of his hoodie up into his mouth and is chewing on the material. 

“no,” jungkook answers him, spitting the damp fabric out and grimacing at the feel of it against his skin. “i’m just … distracted, i guess. didn’t notice.” 

“it’s not like you to be so spacey. is there something on your mind?” for yoongi, this is basically him on his knees pleading with jungkook to talk to him. yoongi’s always there for them but he’s never direct about it, always almost tricks them into giving up the details of whatever they’re struggling with. it’s cute. 

“hyung is cute. i’m okay, though. just gotta go change my shirt.” 

yoongi lets him go but jungkook feels his eyes on his back, tracking him as he crosses the room. 

“hey, you got any spare shirts with you today, hyung?” jungkook asks hoseok, because hoseok pretty often brings like four outfit changes to the studio. as terrible as his taste in clothes is, jungkook would rather wear anything than a hoodie he has dribbled into. 

“sure, you want sleeves?” hoseok doesn’t even look up from his laptop and jungkook likes that. that’s normal. if he gets one more look of vague concern today he’s going to … well, he’s going to feel a bit shitty about himself and love his hyungs a little more. 

“yes please. do you have anything kinda heavy?” jungkook has an excuse about being cold ready on the tip of his tongue. that’s not what it’s about, that’s not at all why he needs to feel completely covered up and swamped in something huge right now; held down and anchored in place lest he just float the fuck away but hoseok doesn’t ask, only rummages through his bag until he pulls out a truly atrocious green and red patchwork creation that genuinely offends jungkook’s eyeballs. it’s thick and about six sizes too big. it’s perfect. 

“thank you hyung,” jungkook says and hoseok seems momentarily startled by his sincerity. 

“anything you need, jk,” he quickly recovers, shooting jungkook cheesy finger guns, his mouth lifting into that heart shaped smile that settles something in jungkook, soothes him somehow. 

after that, jungkook goes to nap between taehyung and namjoon, sprawled out on either end of a couch like mirroring mountains that jungkook could probably happily spend his afternoon leisurely scaling. 

seokjin is sitting with jimin, his legs crossed and his weight leaned back onto his hands, behind him on the floor. his torso seems so long, long, long and the space between his folded up legs looks a lot like home. 

it takes jungkook forever to fall asleep. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/


	4. our home is a trigger that I'm always pulling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jimin kicks his heels against the floor, knees bouncing with agitation for a minute until he sits up again and reaches forward to grab jungkook by the collar of his shirt, drags him in until they’re face to face. 
> 
> “you know what, do whatever you want. i know you’re going to anyway. just remember that i tried to save you from yourself, okay? and like … come find us when this goes disastrously.”

divorced life, jungkook very quickly finds, fucking sucks. 

having to do stuff all the time by himself that he always did with someone else sucks. 

having to do everything for himself and not having someone always on hand to help sucks. 

having to wonder what is and isn’t okay to say to someone you used to tell everything sucks. 

having to buy stuff for himself and himself alone sucks so much that jungkook actually finds himself sniffling in line at a convenience store. 

jungkook wants to be able to automatically pick up stuff that he thinks seokjin would like. he wants to be able to grab food for both of them, always look for seokjin’s favourite drink as automatically as he looks for his own. he wants to scoop up his and seokjin’s room keys when they’re doled out at hotels. he wants to keep two pairs of gloves in his backpack because seokjin always forgets his. he wants to order food the way _they_ like it without having to wonder if they’ll share it, if they’ll even make eye contact tonight. he wants to want to make the bed the way seokjin likes, with the pillows stacked up together in the middle. he wants the mindless, effortless warmth of caring for someone else so deeply that it’s ingrained now, simply part of who he is. 

being part of something more than just himself wasn’t only what jungkook had become accustomed to; it was what made him happy. it was fun. it was good. it was love. 

and now there’s just nothing. so much nothing that jungkook is drowning in it. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

they’re killing time between a radio interview and a performance recording. 

jungkook would, as always, prefer that it was structured the other way around, because it’s easy to talk when you’re riding a rush of endorphins that feels like a tidal wave you’re all too happy to be swept away in. words are fucking nothing compared to the steady, flowing pour of that; those kinds of energy and jungkook has always loved getting to forget to hold himself back and package his thoughts, present the right answers and not slip up and just tell the truth instead. 

he loves it even more now. 

he picks his way through the questions, tip toes and avoids potential land mines as best he can but still trips up some, still stutters and finds himself feeling like he’s shaking off too many different kinds of nervous and preemptively regretful energy, trying to sluice away the slimy grime of second guessing himself before he has to get out on stage and shine, as far from imperfection as he can push himself to be. as close to it as he can pretend to be. 

it makes it both better and worse when they get to come backstage, pass back through the shadows and leave bits and pieces of who they need to be shaken off and hidden away in the darkness between twisted scaffold rigs, tied to the floor beneath the gnarled tangles of a thousand wires. 

jungkook feels lighter with every pass of the make up wipe over his skin, feels so much more like himself with every square centimeter of his bare face that’s revealed, even under artificial, too bright light. 

he’s biting back giggles, fourteen different kinds of newly forged and still burning energy pulsing in him and making him chew at the thousand watt smiles that want to burst out of him. 

he fills his pockets with the bag of candies he finds when he’s looking for his headphones, hidden away deep in the recesses of his backpack and goes, light on his feet, in circles around the room sneaking them into the hands of his members, pressing them into the palms of the staff. 

“what are you going to give me?” seokjin asks, head tilted and the corner of his mouth caught tight and held down beneath his teeth when jungkook tells him to hold out his hand. 

‘anything you want,’ jungkook thinks, but he doesn’t say so, doesn’t say anything at all, only puts the candy in seokjin’s hand and convinces himself to let go, wills himself to walk away. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

it takes four slaps before jungkook deigns to take his headphones off and when he does, he can tell from the volume of jimin’s voice that he probably started yelling at him after the first one. 

it’s flu season and they don’t have the luxury of being mere mortals anymore (if jungkook recalls correctly, that was in the very first contract he’d signed for big hit) so they’re lined up in the waiting room of a private clinic that looks more like the inside of a spaceship. everything is white and so very bright and jungkook just wants to pull his hood down over his eyes and maybe try to squeeze a nap in before it’s time for his shot. 

which is why he doesn’t respond immediately when jimin starts swatting at him. 

“what?” he asks and rolls his eyes when jimin, predictably, gripes at him for it. 

“what _hyung_ ,” he says and jungkook grins, all teeth. 

“you don’t have to call me ‘hyung’, jimin.” 

there’s no time like ‘always’ to be a brat when that really, really works for you, jungkook finds. 

“ugh,” is all jimin says, “whatever. joon-hyung is looking for you. go.” 

and really, he should have started with that. 

jungkook might be an unrepentant brat, but not for namjoon and jimin knows that. literally everybody knows that. people who have never met either of them could take one look at them and know that. 

“what’s up hyung?” jungkook asks when he finds namjoon, sitting with a manager out in the corridor, a laptop open and being passed back and forth between them. 

“oh hey kook,” namjoon looks up, smiling when he sees him and jungkook hopes namjoon isn’t about to ask him to donate his body to science or something, because he’ll do it. “uh. i have a favor to ask?” maybe they want to try and clone jungkook. that would be lit. and not really a surprise. he’s pretty sure he signed those rights away, too. 

“sure, hyung,” jungkook should probably stop agreeing to things before he knows what they are, but he also won’t ever if it’s namjoon that’s asking. “what do you need?” 

“jin hyung is up next for his shot and you know what he’s like,” namjoon says, wincing slightly like that can somehow encompass the magnitude of seokjin’s fear of and hysteria for needles. 

“sure,” jungkook says, because he’s not new. “but what can i -” 

“can you stay with him? make up an excuse after you get your shot and just wait it out with him? the nurses are cool with it, i already asked.” 

the lengths namjoon has to go to as their leader never fails to amaze jungkook. he’s probably going to be fifty years old and find out that namjoon had a hand in regulating his bowel movements all his life, or something. he won’t even be able to pretend to be surprised. that’s probably going to be embarrassing. sucks for you, future jungkook. 

“of course, hyung,” jungkook says because he’s not sure what he can do for seokjin that anyone else can’t, but namjoon asked jungkook to do something so what’s he going to do? say no? not in this lifetime. 

it’s simple enough to wink at a nurse and loudly say something about feeling a little lightheaded after he’s had a tiny little baby version of the flu he’s trying to avoid shot into his body. 

and it’s just kind of awful how much he loves it when seokjin is lead in next, as white as a sheet but pausing to blink at jungkook and then smile at him like he’s genuinely delighted to see him. 

“are you okay?” seokjin asks, sitting down next to him, his brows knitting up when he looks down at the cotton ball jungkook is holding pressed into the crook of his elbow. 

“i’m fine, hyung,” jungkook says, the ‘now that you’re here. now that we’re together i couldn’t be better,’ going unsaid. 

a nurse approaches, gesturing for seokjin to roll his sleeve up and he tenses visibly. 

“hey hyung,” jungkook says, reaching for seokjin’s hand and holding it between both of his - you’re on your own now, cotton ball, good luck and god’s speed but jungkook’s hands have been called to a higher purpose. “did you know that moon rocks taste better than earth rocks do?” 

“why would -” seokjin starts but then he looks away from where the nurse is swabbing his arm to look at jungkook instead and jungkook crows internally, “why?” seokjin settles on, realizing maybe what jungkook is trying to do, but playing along. 

“because they’re a little meteor,” jungkook says, feeling dumb because it is dumb and also not at all his wheelhouse, but seokjin laughs so maybe that doesn’t matter so much. 

seokjin laughs so hard that he has to wipe a tear away and he didn’t even flinch when he got stuck with the needle and they’re both walking back out into the waiting room less than five minutes after seokjin headed in there. 

everyone looks up at them when they return in tandem. 

namjoon shoots jungkook a surreptitious little thumbs up that jungkook replies to with a wink and a barrage of finger hearts. namjoon pretends to get shot by them, fainting dramatically back against the arm of the chair he’s sitting in and seokjin is still letting jungkook hold his hand and hoseok is looking between the two of them approvingly and jungkook feels kind of like he ate sunshine. 

taehyung puts a hand palm up on jungkook’s seat right before he can sink onto it and jungkook squawks when he cops a feel, but all in all it does nothing to quell his quiet delight. 

that day is a good day. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

seokjin spends a lot of time with a small group of some of their dancers. 

they’re nice hyungs, they’ve always been good to jungkook, to all of them. 

seokjin starts spending a lot of time with one of them in particular; a guy called minjae that was jungkook’s favourite dancer hyung, once upon a time. before now. 

now he and seokjin go out to eat after practice, or show up sometimes together. they sit and talk and laugh and joke when there’s a break between runs. seokjin spends a lot of time on his phone whenever they’re at home. 

but his home is still their home. 

sometimes jungkook doesn’t know where seokjin is, who he’s with or when he's coming back. sometimes, seokjin can be standing right next to him and jungkook still hasn’t got a clue where he’s gone. 

but every night he comes home to them and sleeps next to jungkook, in their bed. 

and though he doesn’t know why, that makes something with talons wake up inside jungkook, cracking open an eye and snarling low, guttural in moments when jungkook wants to roar. 

it’s like that horrific monstrous instinct that jungkook had found in himself and unthinkingly acted on when he pushed hoseok, when he hurt his hyung, but it’s different now. 

it’s louder. 

it’s getting harder and harder to ignore. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“my first question is this - what do you think seokjin hyung’s type is?” 

hoseok makes some kind of noise, something halfway between a groan and a questioning sound and jungkook sighs. 

“i _said_ -” 

“no i heard you, i’m just wondering what the fuck is wrong with you.”

hoseok rolls over and sits up, stretching across jungkook to turn on his bedside lamp. jungkook does a quick scan of the terrain, double checking that there are no other people lurking in hoseok’s bed because he had checked when he first snuck in but he’s been burned before and he’d have to kill himself if seokjin was here somewhere. he’s not in jungkook’s bed, so who knows where jungkook might find him, honestly. 

“we don’t have time to unpack all of that, hyung, i just need your help with my seokjin-specific problems right now.” 

hoseok’s eyes are tiny, petulant slits in his face. even his mouth has gone small in palpable anger. 

“jungkook.” 

“it’s okay, hyung. i can go. i’m sorry for waking you,” jungkook turns away and starts to climb out of hoseok’s bed but before he can go too far, hoseok grabs him by the arm and pulls him back. 

“no, no. stay. ask hyung what you want to ask,” hoseok’s eyes are almost open now and he’s tugging jungkook right up against him, tucking him carefully back under the blankets. “sorry, you know i’m a demon when i first wake up.” 

“it’s okay, hyung. i know you’re not at your best in the middle of the night but i don’t need your best. just your mid level excellence would be more than enough to help me, i’m sure.” 

“oh, flattery will get you everywhere, my demon apprentice. now tell hyung what the matter is, we’ll figure it out.” 

“well,” jungkook begins, as close to comfortable as he’s been in weeks, with hoseok cradling him close and listening to his every word, “it’s seokjin hyung. do you think he has a type? did you ever meet that guy he talked about from high school? or anyone else he’s dated? what kind of person does hyung like?” 

hoseok seems to think hard, for a moment. when he finally speaks, he sounds uncertain. 

“seokjin never really talks about people he’s interested in. it doesn’t seem like there are … a lot of those? or like. any, actually. apart from the obvious.” 

which, right. the dude he dated before. the ex-trainee that accidentally surrogate-triggered jungkook’s sexual awakening. and now minjae. fucking minjae. 

“but what is it about them that he likes, though? like what’s he into?” jungkook presses. 

“you’d know that much better than anyone else would, bun.” hoseok kind of has a point, even when he is completely missing the point. sure, jungkook has spent most of his life trying to climb into seokjin’s pockets, but that doesn’t mean they’ve ever talked about this kind of thing. 

jungkook is just about to point this out when the door to hoseok’s bathroom opens and jungkook hears the shower shut off. he’d thought that low hum was a humidifier or something, but he realizes his mistake now as yoongi walks into the room still shower damp and dressed only in a pair of sleep pants. namjoon is right behind him and not exactly dressed for public consumption either. jungkook thinks this is what seokjin means when he squawks at jungkook to hurry inside and close their bedroom door before someone sees him in his ‘delicates.’ 

neither of them even have the decency to pretend to be surprised to see jungkook. similarly they make no move to explain any of what is happening right now, when they cross the room and slide into hoseok’s bed, namjoon walking around the far side to curl up behind hoseok when he’s pushed that way by yoongi, who ducks under the covers to lay down beside jungkook. 

“how come every time i go looking for answers in this house i just end up learning weird shit about the rest of your sex lives and getting absolutely nowhere with my own?” jungkook is just about at breaking point. for like the fifth time this week. but this time it’s serious. “all three of you? seriously?” 

yoongi shrugs and hoseok giggles. 

“does this freak you out? do you want to talk about it?” namjoon asks, because he’s the best out of all of them, really. 

“nah,” jungkook declines, snuggling closer to hoseok so yoongi has enough room on the pillow they’re sharing. “i was actually gonna try and proposition you and yoongi hyung but i can see hoseok hyung got there first. sucks for me, but congrats i guess.” 

“jungkook. you can’t keep wandering into random people’s beds and offering to sleep with them,” yoongi sounds somehow stern and amused at the same time. “one of these days someone is going to take you up on it and then we’re all fucked. i love your jailbait ass but i can’t let it be what breaks bangtan up.” 

which, huh. yoongi is an ass man. interesting. 

“i’m not jailbait anymore. it’s totally legal to bang me, hyung,” jungkook says, shifting until he’s pressed up into yoongi’s side. if yoongi hasn’t stabbed him in a minute, he’s gonna try and pull yoongi’s arm around him. for science, of course. just idle curiosity things. the pursuit of truth and justice and all that. 

“it might be legal, but you’d need to be certifiably insane to try it,” hoseok says, but jungkook is too comfortable to feel sad about how the only people who his hyungs can acknowledge as possibly wanting to bang him are the crazies. mourning that can wait till tomorrow. 

yoongi turns over next to him and jungkook chooses this moment to strike, searching for yoongi’s hand in the sheets and pulling his arm over his waist when he finds it. 

“i purposefully took this spot so namjoon couldn’t hump you in his sleep and now look where it’s gotten me,” his eyes are already closed though, so jungkook knows he’s not mad, not really. 

“just so you know hyung,” jungkook whispers, reaching across him to turn off the bedside lamp and then closing his own eyes, “it would be an honour to have you sleep-hump me in the morning.” 

“seokjin hyung is honestly the bravest man i know,” hoseok says and jungkook hums his agreement instinctively but doesn’t get a chance to properly examine that statement before sleep washes over him. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

because real life continues to be a cruel and unending nightmare, no one humps jungkook awake the next morning. 

hoseok does half-heartedly try to drag jungkook over his knee when jungkook voices his complaints, but he doesn’t really put his heart into pretending to spank jungkook so what is the point, really. 

“hey, seokjin said something about spanking me, once. do you think that’s what he’s into?” 

namjoon stuffs his head under a pillow. 

“join an idol group yoongi, they said. it’ll be fun, they said. you won’t have to dance, they said. why didn’t anyone warn me that i’d have to hear speculation about my bandmate’s non-existent sex lives first thing in the morning while as a multi-millionaire sharing a bed with three other grown men? because honestly, that’s been the worst part of this entire experience.” yoongi sounds more resigned than mad, but jungkook is a kind and considerate dongsaeng so he’s not going to call him on it. which is to say that he’s already gotten distracted by something else and forgets to. 

“hey hyung, do you think i should join a hook up app?” 

jungkook’s monkey brain has just cobbled together a master plan that goes something like this: 

find someone, possibly someones, willing to sleep with him.  
get super good at sex stuff.  
simultaneously figure out what sex stuff seokjin is into.  
become the most accomplished person at that specific stuff.  
be now irresistible to seokjin.  
have all his dreams come true and live happily ever after. 

seokjin doesn’t want jungkook because he doesn’t find jungkook attractive. but what if jungkook was very good at things seokjin does find attractive? wouldn’t that - by extension - make jungkook attractive to seokjin? wouldn’t that logically dictate that seokjin would want to fuck him? if jungkook was metaphorically cloaked in seokjin-specific sexual prowess?

not getting to marry seokjin and have his babies is still going to be a big ass cross to bear, but jungkook thinks his resolve to carry on could be considerably strengthened by getting to get under seokjin even just temporarily. even just once. just one little time. just a tantalising little snack. just one crumb of dick. 

jungkook’s aching, pathetic heart patters in agreement. 

‘do it,’ it thumps, his pulse roaring in his ears, ‘do whatever you have to do to have him, however you can get him.’ 

“i think joining a hook up app could be the answer to my problems,” he decides himself, because even the premise of getting to see seokjin’s dick hard for him, even if only accidentally or as a pavolovian response to seeing jungkook get spanked by someone else or whatever is a pretty fucking convincing selling point. because jungkook doesn’t give one single shit what he has to do if it will mean that seokjin will look at him and _want_. he could even become a furry, he thinks. that’s how goddamn neverending his reservoir of total adoration for seokjin is. 

“you should definitely join a hook up app,” hoseok says, coming back from the bathroom and slapping a hand over yoongi’s mouth when he starts to yell something. “yep, join a hook up app, jungkook-ah. and get seokjin to help you, he’s great at that stuff.” 

jungkook frowns, because how would seokjin be great at that stuff? why would he be? 

“be a good dongsaeng and listen to hyung’s advice, i would never mislead you jk,” hoseok has yoongi held in some kind of standing arm bar now and it seems like yoongi is trying to bite hoseok, but hoseok is grinning. 

rap line are into some weird shit, jungkook decides. but honestly, same, so jungkook just shrugs and goes back to his own room. 

on his way, he stumbles upon a wild seokjin in the living room. 

“hey hyung, could you help me with something later?” 

seokjin looks confused and suspicious, but he nods slowly, like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. 

“sweet,” jungkook declares and then he detours to the kitchen, where he’s going to fry an egg all by himself, because he’s a goddamn adult and he can survive alone. 

once he still has seokjin. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“run that by me one more time.” 

jimin has his elbows on his knees, his hands steepled in front of his face. he’s wearing glasses today and they make his already abjectly terrifying expressionless stare even more intimidating, somehow. 

“he’s gonna make an account on a hook up app, get seokjin to help him to sow the seeds of jealousy, kick it up a notch with succulent and copious thirst traps if i might interject a suggestion, then fuck a bunch of randos so he can curate a sex portfolio to wow and woo seokjin with. what about that isn’t clicking for you? it’s pretty straightforward.” taehyung answers before jungkook can and thank god for that honestly because jimin is still staring at him, eerily unblinking and jungkook knows a breeding ground for the stutters when it’s boring its way into his very soul. 

“yeah. wh - what he said,” he’s maybe trembling but it’s fine. jimin can’t kill him this close to a comeback. right? 

“if we didn’t have a new single to promote, i’d be strongly considering burying your body in the woods right now,” jimin says and taehyung gasps. 

“murder? intrigue! but also - that’s mean, minnie.” 

“you’d be helping me. do you think i could carry this dick-dumb bigfoot by myself? you’re my muscle, babe,” why any of this is cause for jimin to leer at taehyung, jungkook doesn’t know, but taehyung doesn’t seem to mind. 

“anything you need, cariño,” he says, winking at jimin and then shrugging at jungkook in apology. “bro-hos before ho-bros, sorry.” 

“your love is both nauseating and motivating,” jungkook says, because even when they’re plotting his murder they’re couple goals, “so why don’t you want me to be happy too? why can’t i have what you guys have?” 

jimin moves, a little too quickly for jungkook’s liking so you’ll forgive him if he startles and drops his phone, but jimin only reaches out to tuck the tag of jungkook’s shirt back down under the collar. seokjin normally does that for him. it used to be one of their things. he’s been around seokjin a lot today, too much maybe and not nearly enough and he hadn’t reached to fix jungkook’s tag once. 

“i want that for you,” jimin says, “which is why i’m not entirely convinced that you dicking down a bunch of thirsty local gays is what’s going to get you and seokjin your happily ever after.” 

taehyung hums. 

“would you be doing the dicking down or getting dicked down, though? do you like both? maybe the solution is for you to do both. like, at the same time. you’d need two people for that of course, but i’m sure you could -” 

“down boy,” jimin interrupts sharply, pinching taehyung’s ear hard. 

“though it hurts me to say this, taehyung has a point,” he continues. “your formative slut phase seems like it was probably far too fucking frenzied to let you properly figure this stuff out. do you even know what you like? what you could theoretically be looking for?” 

what jungkook is looking for isn’t theoretical at all. it’s across the room reading an actual physical book like some kind of hot grandpa. 

“this isn’t about me, it’s about jin. so i can like whatever he’s into.” 

jimin groans and flops back onto the floor with his arm thrown up over his eyes. 

“i can’t take it anymore. i just can’t do it. you’re gonna have to go on without me, tae. avenge me. build a lot of very beautiful memorial sculptures.” 

he kicks his heels against the floor, knees bouncing with agitation for a minute until he sits up again and reaches forward to grab jungkook by the collar of his shirt, drags him in until they’re face to face. 

“you know what, do whatever you want. i know you’re going to anyway. just remember that i tried to save you from yourself, okay? and like … come find us when this goes disastrously.” 

“or if you think of anything else you might need our help with,” taehyung adds, because he’s the most helpful, the sweetest hyung. he’s lovely and jungkook doesn’t understand why jimin is giving him a nipple cripple so brutal that it makes jungkook cover his own nips protectively, out of sympathy. 

“you don’t have to worry hyungs,” he assures them, pocketing his phone and standing up, brushing his pants off, “i know what i’m doing. this is gonna be great.” 

both jimin and taehyung look at him like they did the time he asked them how you’re supposed to tell the time on those weird old clocks he sees sometimes, all dumb and like analog or whatever when everything makes more sense when it’s digital? obviously. 

which is to say they look at him with twin expressions of utmost despair. 

it’s fine. jungkook isn’t even a little bit worried. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

in a decidedly irritating turn of events, jungkook has to let his plans to seduce seokjin take a temporary backseat to secondary concerns such as their, like, careers. 

they’re busy as fuck all of a sudden and this reinforces jungkook’s suspicion that seokjin doesn’t date simply because he doesn’t have the fucking time. 

jungkook is currently getting changed in a moving car as he simultaneously tries to brush his teeth. he smiles his thanks around the toothbrush when the stylist noona helpfully wipes away the mint flavoured drool that’s trying to escape his mouth. 

hours go by in seconds, on days like today. sometimes it feels like jungkook could blink and open his eyes to find himself somewhere else, doing something else, feeling like someone else. 

there’s only two constants, during comeback. 

the first is the music. back when they were still rookies jungkook couldn’t understand how any artist could get sick of a song they’d written and were getting to perform because it was then still such a rush to him that it felt like it would always be a dream. then for a while jungkook had gotten it. not because it wasn’t a rush anymore, but because he knew that in the studio, on their hard-drives, in namjoon’s lyric notes, they were already working on things that jungkook was impatient to get to share. things that felt more imperative, more important right now than what they were performing. jungkook has always struggled with concepts like patience and waiting. now, the song they’re promoting becomes an anchor for jungkook. if he keeps his focus on the song, on performing it as best he possibly can, explaining the meaning of it as well as he’s capable of and doing whatever it takes to get to that place where all that really matters is sharing how they feel with people who have felt the same way, might one day need the comfort of knowing they weren’t alone in it, or are right now in it right alongside them, then that can be what matters most on any given day. 

that’s why they do what they do. 

and that’s what bonds them, too. a shared common goal that every single one of them has sacrificed everything for. 

the second constant is them. no feeling ever comes close for jungkook to how he feels when he’s lost in a sea of people, a backstage crammed with bodies ricocheting pin ball fast across space too small to contain them all or a shoot that’s loud with noise, a deafening cacophony of movement, cables and cameras a criss crossed hazard everywhere he looks and in the midst of it all, he can find six faces that make all of that fall away. 

by the time they started promoting their songs, it was different with seokjin already. it was the same, but more. when jungkook’s eyes find yoongi or jimin or hobi or namjoon or taehyung in a crowd he goes still, his mind gone quiet and calm because there’s nothing to worry about now, nothing they can’t do or be or overcome once they’re together. 

with seokjin, it’s that same feeling. but after a split second pulse of ‘safe, good, home’, something in jungkook wakes up. everything in him wants to dart into motion, wants to get to seokjin and fight to stay there. he’s spent years pressed to seokjin’s side, draping himself over him, wearing seokjin’s backhugs like a royal mantle. and it’s never felt like enough. jungkook’s never had seokjin so close to him that he didn’t still want more. 

jungkook isn’t stupid enough to think that fucking seokjin would satiate his need for him. jungkook knows, without ever having gotten to, that touching seokjin would just make it worse, could only ever make him want him more. 

and even though jungkook knows now that he’ll never have him, not like he really wants him, jungkook is just about as stupid and reckless and selfish and masochistic as he needs to be to pursue seokjin still, to keep trying for whatever bits and pieces of him he’ll let jungkook have, however he can get them, whatever he has to do. 

once upon a time, jungkook dreamed of a time when seokjin would want him, too. jungkook had hoped and wished and believed, sometimes, that he could make seokjin happier than anyone else could. 

but jungkook knows better, now. 

this isn’t a fairytale and jungkook isn’t a child anymore. he’s woken up from his dream-sweet sleep and is rubbing the rose-tint from his eyes. 

he’s resigned to his fate and he has accepted the mundanity of it; the not-nearly-enough of it all that seems to mark it as adulthood, finally. 

like the dawn of a brand new day, everything is clear now, to jungkook.

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

the end is nigh. 

the finish line looms ever nearer on the horizon. 

two more performances and jungkook can sleep and eat and sleep and eat and game until his hands fall off and get back to making himself comfortable in the wreckage he finds himself living in now. 

they’ve run through their stage twice already, but there was a technical problem with the lighting that needs to be fixed before they can do a final performance and it’s going to take a while, according to the apologetic pd. 

they’re still dressed for it, full hair and makeup still in place but most of the members are sleeping, having years ago perfected the art of sleeping like your face is a motion-activated bomb. 

jungkook is kind of keyed up, can’t decide whether he should just power through or force himself to sleep when a hand on his shoulder makes him look up. 

“hey,” seokjin says, his voice as soft as his hand is tentative, “do you want to maybe … would you come walk with me?” 

it’s the middle of the night, so late now that it’s almost early and there’s no one around when they descend upon the streets of seoul, sticking to the back alleys even though they’re trailed by a couple of staff who follow far enough behind to give them the illusion of privacy. 

they don’t need it, because they don’t speak. 

they walk side by side, close enough that their hands brush sometimes and seokjin doesn’t move away when it happens so jungkook takes that as excuse enough for him not to, either. 

spending time together in silence isn’t new for them, but it feels different now. 

before, jungkook hadn’t had any reason to doubt the comfortable, familiar ease of sitting in silence with someone he loved, someone he understood, someone so familiar and so known to him that words weren’t always necessary between them. 

jungkook and seokjin are both so loud around others, in front of a camera that they need the soothing silence of down time and it was always something they luxuriated in together, shared in a way that felt special to jungkook; made him feel like seokjin wanted to show him something he didn’t readily share with many. 

tonight, the silence is familiar but charged. 

the night that stretches out around them feels so very far away, so few lights on in the homes they pass, the sounds of life muted where they walk. it’s like they’re in a bubble, separated from everyone and everything else in some significant way and it’s always felt that way, to jungkook, but now that he’s in it again he’s on edge. he’s tensed and waiting for seokjin to burst it again. 

“hyung missed you, guk,” seokjin says, not looking at him and jungkook’s stupid heart goes belly up in his chest, preens for the words, hammers in him for seokjin. 

“i didn’t go anywhere, hyung,” jungkook reminds him, just to say something that isn’t ‘why don’t you love me, what do i have to do to make you want me?’ 

“i know,” seokjin says and he’s still looking directly ahead when jungkook peeks at him from out of the corner of his eye, when his hand brushes against jungkook’s with purpose and then folds around it, holding on. “but you’ve been quiet. you went quiet on me.” 

“sorry, hyung,” jungkook says because he is. the last thing he wants to do is make seokjin worry. jungkook’s heartbreak is jungkook’s business, it’s not anyone else’s mess to clean up and jungkook has to do whatever it takes to make sure seokjin doesn’t suffer because of it. “i’ve just been thinking about some things, that’s all. nothing’s wrong.” 

“have you been spending too much time with namjoon and yoongi?” seokjin wants to know and he’s still holding jungkook’s hand and jungkook thinks he could probably walk the whole way to busan if he got to hold hands with seokjin like this, just the two of them, away from prying eyes and blinding lights and the sympathetic, knowing glances jimin keeps giving him lately. “i know what the two of them get like when they’re in those brain wormholes they like to dig into together, you shouldn’t follow them there. the good and pure and still idealistic parts of you will get broken and then i’ll have to hurt them, jk. you don’t want hyung to have to commit bodily harm, do you?” 

it probably shouldn’t thrill jungkook to hear seokjin so easily allude to being willing to defend his innocence with violence, but a lot of stuff happens to jungkook that probably shouldn’t so he just basks in it and snickers a little to himself, his nose scrunching with it. he’s happy. he’s so happy just being with seokjin, listening to him talk, walking right next to him. 

“i’m serious, jungkook. those nihilistic little shits are like a fungus. we’ve got to protect your dreams. if you ever stop being able to dream, i’ll have truly failed you and you know i hate failing at things when i could completely excel at them instead.” 

it’s kind of difficult, jungkook finds, to breathe when it feels like your lungs are full of broken glass. 

“the hyungs haven’t broken me,” he manages to say and the weight and extent of that statement doesn’t escape him. what he doesn’t let himself say is so very loud. but the thing is, it’s true. nothing any of his hyungs have done is entirely responsible for what jungkook is feeling. he did that all by himself - he did this _to_ himself - by being so overconfident, by letting himself get so fucking cocky that he thought, for a moment, for years, that he deserved to have everything he wanted. 

“good. it’ll stay that way, don’t worry,” seokjin reassures him, when jungkook should be the one reassuring him. 

“i’m fine. i’m good, hyung,” jungkook sounds convinced, “you don’t ever have to worry about me, okay?” 

“oh, i don’t worry about you, jungkook. you’re jungkook. but …” seokjin trails off and looks down at their joined hands, swings them back and forth and seems to lose track of what he was about to say. he’s silent for a moment, quiet in the space between one streetlight and the next before he speaks again. “but i can think about you, right? i can care?” 

“of course,” the words bloom out of jungkook’s mouth, rising up out of the very depths of him. “of course you can care. i care about you too, hyung. i think about you.” - always. _always_ he doesn’t add. 

“good,” seokjin is smiling now, only one side of his mouth lifted up into it like he’s trying to keep it small, “so don’t be so quiet with me, jungkook. tell me what you’re thinking. tell me anything. don’t think you have to keep things from me. whatever you’re thinking, think it out loud.” 

that’s the way jungkook has always been with seokjin. with all of them, really, but especially with seokjin. sometimes jungkook pauses before speaking or takes a stuttering second to go through the excruciating act of trying to make what he’s thinking sound different, sound better, sound like something he should say and not just what he wants to say, said exactly as he wants to say it. but that never happens when it’s like this, just the two of them. it never did, at least. 

“i’m always listening, jungkook,” seokjin says and jungkook for a change, just to try something different, keeps walking next to seokjin, keeps hold of his hand and doesn’t think about anything that he shouldn’t say to him. it’s better not to. 

what jungkook wants isn’t all that matters. 

this is now simply a case of what jungkook can and can not have. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 

“hey hyung, what do you think of this?” seokjin dutifully lifts his head to look at jungkook’s phone when he holds it out to him and then drops his chopsticks when he sees what’s on the screen. 

“jeon jungkook. this - is this a picture of you in your underwear?” which - stupid question. 

“you know it is, hyung. you’ve seen me naked.” like, a lot of times. like, so often. it’s kind of embarrassing, probably. or it would be, if jungkook wasn’t at all times ready and waiting to strip down and assume any position seokjin told him to. 

“i have,” seokjin says faintly, “and yet i had until this very moment never seen your dick very clearly hard in your boxers. you know, i woke up this morning with a strange sense that today was going to be important somehow, but i really didn’t anticipate that a clothed dick pic would be what altered the course of my entire life.” his voice is weird, like he’s somehow really far away even though he’s right in front of jungkook still. his words are all tensed, it sounds almost like he’s choking up or being strangled. like jungkook said - weird. seokjin isn’t a prude. he’s actually the hyung that jungkook is the most comfortable being his insatiably thirsty self around, even when his thirst - almighty and ever present - is for seokjin. it’s weird, how seokjin seems to be struggling with this. 

“life altering? hyung. that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.” it doesn’t even matter that seokjin technically said it about his dick. jungkook is blushing. see? this plan was clearly the best idea jungkook has ever had - and it’s working already! 

“so you think i should put it on my profile, right? i can’t use shots of my face, obviously, but do you think people would be able to tell who i was from a shirtless pic? and we need to talk about my preferences.” 

seokjin’s neck is starting to flush and he’s still staring at jungkook’s phone kind of bizarrely intently but if he wants to commit the image of jungkook in his underwater to memory, jungkook can and will facilitate that for him. he thumbs the screen to make sure the image stays bright, he’s a helpful and considerate dongsaeng that way. 

“your preferences?” seokjin is still staring but he’s tilting his head now, frowning the way he does when he’s trying and failing to remember all of their birthdays. the flush has spread up over his jaw. jungkook wants to taste it. 

“yeah, you have to check what you are and aren’t into on this hook up app. that’s what i wanted your help with. i asked, remember? and you said you’d help. am i into ass to mouth, hyung? do you think i should be?” 

seokjin stands up then and for a brief but blissful fraction of a second, jungkook thinks seokjin might be about to offer to help him figure it out via a friendly personal demonstration. 

“i love you. you are my precious and beloved dongsaeng and i adore you, but i need you to not talk to me for the next few hours. don’t even look at me, please, if you think you can manage it,” seokjin says and then he’s walking away and jungkook didn’t even get to show him his thigh pics. those were like, his best work. 

across the room, seokjin is on his knees in front of namjoon and both namjoon and jungkook are in agreement that this is a not a tolerable turn of events if the confused and alarmed look on namjoon’s face and the way jungkook wants to storm over there and lie face down on the ground so seokjin can kneel on him instead of on the dirty floor is anything to go by. 

“leader-nim,” seokjin says and both namjoon and jungkook gasp. “i know you might not understand right now, but i need to leave the group. effective immediately. you’ll get it one day. it will all become apparent. just switch rooms with me. and then … have all of my life experiences. and you will get it. you will understand that i have to do this, namjoon.” 

namjoon starts laughing then and that’s always a good sound, a pretty great sight besides, but seokjin isn’t laughing. he’s rubbing his hands together and he’s still on his knees and jungkook’s teeth groan under the pressure of how hard he’s grinding them together. 

“funny, hyung,” namjoon says and seokjin puts his head into his hands. “what’s really going on? you need me to cover for you with ssaem for a while? i’ve got you, go take a nap or whatever. i’ll come find you in a bit.” 

“that’s not -” seokjin starts to say but seems to think better of it. he shoots a look that jungkook can’t decipher back over his shoulder, but it seems distinctly pained for some reason or another. “you know what, fine. just give me ten minutes. fifteen maybe. i’ll be back. i’m sorry about … who i am as a person. i’m truly, wholly sorry that i was ever born.” 

he’s on his feet again and out of the room without looking back before namjoon can question him any further, but namjoon probably has four thousand other things to worry about today so jungkook isn’t surprised when he just picks his phone up and goes back to whatever he’d been doing before, easy as you please. 

so the plan hasn’t come to glorious full fruition on day one. 

jungkook is disappointed by not surprised. 

he’d really thought pg-13 dick pics were a great opener and things seemed to be going so well at first? 

but still, jungkook didn’t think it would be this easy. 

he’s not discouraged by this. 

he can do it, he can become whatever kind of person it is that seokjin wants. 

he can and he will, because he is jeon jungkook and neither this nor anything else will defeat him. 

he’s got the power of god _and_ anime on his side. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

when their promotions finally conclude, jungkook sleeps for nineteen hours straight, then jumps in the shower and heads out to catch up with his ‘97 line friend group. 

it’s nice, having friends who aren’t in bangtan but understand what his life is like, too. 

it’s kind of scary also, though, that they all seem to think of jungkook as someone who like … has his shit together. 

“the comeback was fine, it was good, but -” 

“you broke like eleven records. you made the guinness book of _world_ records. that’s ‘fine’? damn, global superstars are different, huh?” bambam interjects and jungkook rolls his eyes at him but his cheeks heat up too. 

“okay it was great. but i wasn’t my best. i’m still not. stuff is …. i’ve got stuff. stuff and … things.” 

“no, stop, you’re overwhelming us with all these details. for real though, all the scrutiny has to be tough, man, like how do you deal with anything when everyone wants to know all your business, all the time?” mingyu says, piling meat on jungkook’s plate like a full stomach will fix him right up. mingyu is a feeder and jungkook supports his choices. filling his face with beef definitely seems like the preferable option when the other one is acknowledging that he’s in love with his bandmate who doesn’t return his feelings. idol dating scandals have always been big business, but trust jungkook to get into one that could potentially collapse the country’s economy if bangtan have to break up because he’s such a fucking baby.

“i can’t even fuck up without doing it spectacularly,” he says, feeling sorry for himself mid-chew and eunwoo pats him on the back and pours him another shot of soju. 

“yeah, yeah your excellence is a curse,” he says, which is rich of him to say, with a face like that. “but you’re like … you. you’ll get through it. don’t you always?” 

jungkook downs his shot and squints at the burn, at what eunwoo has said. because - what? 

“um. what?” 

“you know. you’re … you,” eunwoo elaborates, gesturing at jungkook like he’s illustrating a point he hasn’t even made yet. 

“what he means is, you’re not like most maknaes. honestly, it actually seems like you keep things together in your group and that’s aside from the fact that your hyungs don’t have to run around after you making sure you’re not setting something on fire or threatening to throw shoe racks out the window at saesangs.” jaehyun says all of this so very matter of factly, jungkook almost finds himself agreeing. jaehyun’s got that kind of tone. 

“hey, no maknae slander,” yugyeom tries to interject but bambam snorts so loud that the rest of them don’t even have to point out the obvious, which is that if he feels attacked by jaehyun’s statement then that’s probably for a reason. 

“my hyungs take care of me,” jungkook says, still not getting it at all because sure jaehyun’s group’s maknae is lee donghyuk and literally nobody else is quite that chaotic, but jungkook doesn’t think his own energy is that far off, honestly. maybe outwardly he can make it seem like he knows what he’s doing, but inside he’s screaming. constantly. 

“for sure, but you take care of your hyungs right back. it’s like … symbiotic. you guys have balance,” jaehyun says the word ‘balance’ like just the idea of it excites him and jungkook, not for the first time, thanks any deity that might be listening that he’s at the company he’s at, with the group he’s in, the way they’ve made that work. 

“you’re right. i’m lucky. all of us are lucky. we don’t always get it right, but we always work for that, for one another,” when jungkook says this, seokmin looks at him with shining eyes and jungkook has to work quick to head off what’s about to become a rousing speech on the beauty of brotherhood. they’ve all heard that one enough. 

“so what’s going on with you guys?” he tosses the question out and lets himself get lost in the answers, gives himself and the next few hours of his night over to helping his friends, if he can, but just listening to them and letting them know that they’ve been heard even when he can’t. 

being a good friend isn’t always about doing things, jungkook knows. 

he learned that the same way he learned most things he knows; by looking at his hyungs and trying to figure out what they needed and how he could be that for them. 

most of the things jungkook knows - so much of anything he can say he is good at or proud of - he learned from his hyungs. 

but some things (the most important ones) he learned for them. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

before jungkook has finished punching in the door code, he can hear that he’s about to walk in on some tomfoolery. 

several people ‘boo’ very loudly as he’s toeing his boots off and there’s a sound a lot like someone being pushed into or maybe off of a piece of furniture. 

when jungkook rounds the corner, he’s not in the least bit surprised to find all of his members gathered around a coffee table that’s covered in every type of alcohol jungkook can name. 

“oh so you were just going to celebrate without me? i see how it is, hyungs,” he says, shaking his head as he crosses the room to them. 

jimin reaches out a hand towards him and pulls him down onto the floor next to him when jungkook gets close enough. 

“we knew you’d come back eventually,” he reasons, “plus we’ve barely started. hobi hyung isn’t even tipsy yet.” 

choosing to manfully overlook the fact that he’s just been referred to like a stray cat, jungkook accepts the bottle of beer namjoon pops the lid off and passes to him, even though he’s definitely already a few drinks ahead of the rest of them. jungkook’s tolerance is pretty high plus when he’s drunk, he’s still pretty chill. he’s himself, but both more and less wordy. not as mouthy, but more honest. 

which never really occurred to him as being his potential downfall, until - 

“boo you whore,” hoseok throws a handful of pretzels at taehyung, who catches at least half of them in his mouth and grins widely as he chews, apparently entirely unashamed of how he and jimin first consummated their relationship with bathroom blowjobs backstage at mubank. 

“what? i’m supposed to act like i’m embarrassed by any situation that involves this mouth on my dick? i won’t!” taehyung is both loud and proud, thumbing at jimin’s bottom lip with … nostalgia? 

jungkook has kind of lost the thread of whatever is happening right in front of him. he’s pretty sure they’d been playing ‘truth or dare’ and it had started off the way it always did - with hoseok suggesting it because he’s a nosey bitch and yoongi backing him up because these impromptu sessions inevitably better equip him to know and care for his bandmates even though he disguises any act thereof as outward hostility instead - but somewhere along the way jimin and taehyung had launched a tag team mission to make it as filthy as possible and either one of them was enough to accomplish any goal, but both of them? 

bangtan never stood a chance. rip in peace to anything any of them had ever hoped to keep secret because vmin are out for blood. 

almost like they can hear his increasingly panicked thoughts, taehyung and jimin turn to him in unison and jungkook knows - he _knows_ \- that his life is never going to be the same again. 

things have been pretty tumultuous in general for him of late, but change can always be an opportunity for positive growth, according to namjoon and jungkook could maybe have been on his way to becoming a better person, probably. 

sucks that he won’t get to live long enough to reap the benefits of that, now.

“truth or dare, 'guk?” taehyung asks, faux sweet and jungkook doesn’t even have to think before he answers “dare!” because that way he can hopefully get out of this only having had to like, fuck taehyung or something instead of - oh god - having to talk out loud about his feelings. 

“okay,” taehyung smile takes up half his face and jungkook kind of wants to hit him, except for how it would be like punching a shark and not even jungkook is that dumb. not when the shark is a shark he loves. “i dare you to -” he looks across the table at jimin, who communicates something to him with just a quick slide of his eyes from jungkook to seokjin. 

jungkook is maybe about to throw up. or throw himself off the balcony. 

“ooh, yeah. i dare you to tell us all about the last fantasy you masturbated to.” 

and seokjin had been scrolling through something on his phone, probably backreading his texts from minjae today but he looks up, then. and this is a win for jungkook, because it means that he didn’t see the look jimin passed between them, but it’s also the very opposite of a win for jungkook because of how he now has to sit in a room with seokjin in it and recount for them all the last time he got himself off to the thought of fucking seokjin and at least half the people present have to know that that’s what’s about to go down. 

jungkook kind of wants to cry, kind of wants to laugh, but most of all wants to be someone else who is somewhere else talking about something else. 

“you don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to,” namjoon is looking at jungkook with big, sympathetic eyes and jungkook is so grateful for him that he kind of wants to make out with him, purely out of gratitude, just chill bro things. 

“yeah if it’s like, super embarrassing we won’t judge you for not sharing,” hoseok adds and that kind of offends jungkook, because he’s not even a little bit embarrassed about the thoughts he jerks off to because they are all seokjin and they are as such all gorgeous, glorious things, thank you. 

“but also don’t be embarrassed about anything you’re into, there’s no need to be,” seokjin himself contributes and jungkook knows, he knows somewhere in the hollow parts of his bones that this is one of those moments where he’s supposed to exhibit like … self restraint, self awareness, self control, self something or other, but he also knows that he kissed tipsy goodbye three drinks ago and seokjin says he doesn’t have to apologize for anything he wants, so fuck it. 

“fuck it,” he says, tipping the bottom of his beer bottle to the ceiling and draining it before adding it to the pile of empties that’s steadily snaking its way out from underneath the table. “get fucking comfortable, hyungs,” he warns and then he lets his head fall back onto the seat of the sofa he’s sitting back against and closes his eyes and starts to talk. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/


	5. can i still make it right? can i be what you like?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> seokjin seems to be searching for something in jungkook’s still wet eyes and if jungkook knew what it was he’d show it to him, but in the absence of that knowledge he’s perfectly content to just show seokjin everything that’s inside of him and let him figure out for himself if what he needs is in there, in jungkook somewhere.

it’s easier, not being able to see anyone as he does this, but it’s harder too because this way, with his eyes closed, he can hear better than he’d like. it’s deafening when seokjin takes a deep breath, beside him. 

jungkook can’t look. jungkook won’t look. 

so he opens his mouth and talks, instead. 

“okay, so i was thinking about a scenario where the person i’m with is like … out for some reason. off doing their own thing or like. working or whatever. point is - we’re spending the day apart. they’re doing something important, something that means they can’t pay attention to me for a few hours, which annoys me, so i spam them with messages. dirty ones. selfies and stuff too, super teasing.” taehyung says ‘ooh nice’ appreciatively but jungkook ignores him, folding his legs up underneath himself and stacking his hands over his stomach in the pouch pocket of his hoodie, pushing the hem of it down to cover his crotch because this is mortifying enough without the rest of them seeing that he’s getting hard just thinking about this. again. 

“and then they come back. or like … come over,” which, whoops. slip of the tongue. “or maybe i … go to their place? whatever, that part doesn’t matter. what’s important is that the second they see me, they’re on me. hands fisted in my shirt, so worked up and pissed off at me that it doesn’t even matter if anyone else is home, if anyone’s around to see.” jungkook isn’t an exhibitionist per se, but the thought of seokjin being so wholly focused on fucking him that he doesn’t care who might see really gets him going. he’s just a boy. a boy who wants to be all his hyung can think about. jungkook has to lick his lips before he can continue because his mouth is dry, knowing that seokjin is sitting two feet away from him, knowing that everything he’s talking about he imagined happening right here, in this apartment. 

“he doesn’t even speak, doesn’t say a thing, just kisses me like he’s needed to - wanted to - all day. he bites at my mouth, sucks on my tongue and i take it, i let him do whatever he wants because all i want is him.” someone, somewhere in the room makes a sound like an aborted gasp and then someone else coughs in a late attempt to cover it, but jungkook is too far gone now to care or pause. 

“then he spins me around, pushes me face first to the wall and holds me there, his hand on the back of my neck. with his other hand he pushes my sweats down my legs, slaps at my thigh until i step out of them. he knows i already prepped before he got here, because i sent him pics of my fingers in me, but he still kicks my feet apart to check, pushes his face into my hair and gets me trying to sit back onto three of his fingers, tells me i have to ask nicely for his dick, convince him that i deserve to get fucked.” jungkook has to pause, shifts in his seat because he’s hard enough for it to be noticeable now and jesus isn’t this humiliating enough? no one tries to stop him, though, no one says a goddamn thing, so he keeps going. 

“and i do. i want it so bad that i beg. he moves away, backs off of me completely and i hate that, i try to turn around, to go after him, but he holds me still, keeps his hand on my shoulder and holds me down. then he’s back, pressed right up against me, all over me. i feel small, with him. under him. because he covers me completely,” mortifyingly, jungkook’s eyes start to sting, then. he grits his teeth and screws his eyes shut harder and continues. 

“and then he fucks me right there, just like that. his body holding me up, holding me down, his hips making mine hit the wall i’m pressed against and it hurts, probably, but i don’t give a shit and neither does he because the thought of coming home and doing this to me made him lose his mind a little. and i love that, because i always feel that way, can barely fucking think through how much i want him like that, want him on me, in me so much that i’d do anything to get him there.” 

probably the most embarrassing part of this whole thing is how the fantasy actually ends - with seokjin picking him up and carrying him to bed after, cleaning him up and taking care of him, cuddling and babying him, kissing him slow and gentle till they both fall asleep, jungkook cuddled up in seokjin’s arms. 

“uh,” jungkook clears his throat awkwardly, “yeah. that’s. that’s what i thought about.” 

silence. 

there is only silence. 

he cracks one eye open and glances carefully around the room. 

namjoon is blushing furiously, which was a given. yoongi is kind of flushed too, but he also looks like he wants to smash the bottle that’s white-knuckled in his hand and then stab someone with the broken parts of it. probably himself, or maybe jungkook. is yoongi disappointed in him for being such a slut for seokjin? because if he is, they’ve got a serious problem on their hands. hobi looks almost shell-shocked, bug eyed and open mouthed. taehyung is trying and failing to tug the sides of his shirt down to cover his clearly hard dick. jimin is staring off into space and breathing hard through his nose, tonguing at one of his incisors like he does when he’s especially pissed off and that fact alone should make it not at all hot, but it’s jimin and jungkook kind of has a thing for teeth so it’s fuck him, he guesses. 

it takes him a second to build up the courage to look at seokjin, but when he does he wishes he hadn’t. seokjin’s eyebrows are furrowed, low on his face like he’s in pain and his lips are a thinned, white line. 

jungkook wants to crawl across the floor to him, wants to take seokjin’s face in his hands and press his mouth to the crease above his nose, butterfly kiss his soft skin until seokjin is smiling again. 

he wants to know that seokjin isn’t disgusted by him and what he wants because he has to have figured out that jungkook was talking about him - he has to know that jungkook only ever thinks of him - and he might be a good enough hyung that he won’t make jungkook feel bad about that, but that doesn’t mean he can change how he feels about it, especially when he’s just had to hear about it. in explicit detail. in front of all of their friends. 

jungkook hopes he isn’t disgusted. he hopes, selfishly, that seokjin can hear about jungkook’s fantasies about the two of them together and just feel … nothing, maybe. because jungkook knows he’s not into it, but he can’t bear the thought of saying or doing or … or … being something that makes seokjin’s stomach roil. 

“well, shit,” taehyung finally speaks and it seems to break whatever spell they’d all fallen under, because jimin laughs, still sounding kind of dazed and namjoon joins in. yoongi and seokjin both reach for another drink and hoseok shakes his head. 

“i honestly thought we’d traversed the depths of your depravity that time with the hentai thing, but damn, jk. i underestimated you.” 

jungkook can’t tell if hoseok is referring to the nature of his sexual fantasies or the fact that he just recounted them in great detail to a room full of his closest friends and the object of his affections, the very subject of his depraved yearnings himself. 

but hey, jungkook gets wordy when he’s trashed and they all know it, so anyone who heard more than they wanted to only has himself to blame for that. 

besides. 

“seokjin hyung says i don’t have to be ashamed of what i want,” he announces to the room, taking the opportunity to remind himself of that fact, too. 

yoongi starts choking, which is weird because he wasn’t even drinking right then, but hoseok and namjoon are both reaching out to pat his back and then seokjin is murmuring something that sounds like “i really did say that, didn’t i,” and getting up, very loudly announcing something about needing to open a new bottle of wine. 

“you could probably have your own harem, i think,” taehyung tells jungkook with something suspiciously like admiration shining in his eyes. “i’d help you. i’d build it for you, if i got to be in it,” he says and jungkook doesn’t know how he went from being totally fine to clearly fucking wasted out of his mind but it’s definitely a good thing when jimin takes taehyung by the hand and leads him off to bed. 

the game dissolves, just like that, but jungkook stays where he is and drinks some more with rap line until hoseok starts to fall asleep and yoongi has to help namjoon pick him up. the three of them work so well together; they’re perfectly coordinated in everything they do, it seems like and jungkook sits and watches them walk away, hoseok on namjoon’s back with all his limbs wrapped tight around him and yoongi walking next to them, one hand on hoseok’s back and namjoon’s arm around his shoulders. 

seokjin never came back after leaving to go grab some wine from the kitchen. jimin and jungkook had both tried to go looking for him, but yoongi stopped them, made them hold off. 

when jungkook goes to bed, seokjin is there. 

he’s curled up on his side with his knees tucked in and up toward his chest, fast asleep. he must have found and downed that wine, because he’s clingy like he only gets when he’s drunk or upset and he has jungkook’s pillow in his arms instead of his own. 

“silly hyung,” jungkook whispers, brushing seokjin’s hair back out of his face but not switching his pillow out for the right one. he just grabs seokjin’s, pausing when he realizes how strongly it smells of seokjin’s shampoo. of seokjin. he’s still kinda drunk too though, he allows himself to reason, so that makes it totally excusable for him to put his face in the pillow and breathe slow and deep until he’s almost asleep. 

he’s teetering on the precipice of lucidity when seokjin moves next to him, shifts closer. 

“love you, guk,” seokjin says and jungkook can’t tell if he’s still asleep or not but he’s holding onto jungkook’s pillow like it’s going to try to escape, “love you so much,” he says again, a soft little babble of words and jungkook closes his eyes again, holds his breath. 

“you too. i love you too, hyung,” he says, not caring whether seokjin is awake to hear it. it doesn’t matter whether he is or not, because him hearing it doesn’t change the fact that jungkook means it. 

even if he never hears it the way jungkook means, jungkook doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to stop saying it. 

jungkook is the tree falling and seokjin is in a different forest altogether. 

jungkook is just a tree and seokjin is the whole world, really, too big, too much, too everywhere all at once to hear just one sound, even when that sound is everything jungkook can say, all that he can do at all. 

jungkook is drunk and this metaphor is getting away from him, but what he knows for sure is this - if he has to find other ways to tell seokjin that he loves him, he will. 

and if the only way he gets to try and explain how he feels is to get on his hands and knees for seokjin, then jungkook will make that work. 

if there is a way to say it that seokjin can understand, jungkook will find it. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

a hungover seokjin is the cutest, sweetest, softest seokjin and jungkook is suffering. 

“come here and cuddle your hyung,” seokjin says first thing the next morning, before he has even opened his eyes. he doesn’t think to question if jungkook is here. maybe he knows he is; can tell somehow without looking. or maybe he just takes it for granted that jungkook is going to stay with him, stay wherever he is. he could do that. he wouldn’t be wrong. 

jungkook has been awake for a while. he never really gets a good nights sleep after he drinks; waking up thirsty, waking up needing to pee, waking up because his idiot brain misses seokjin every time he closes his eyes. 

he’s been lying here awake for a while now, ignoring the increasingly insistent call of his bladder to just watch seokjin sleep, instead. 

he loves seokjin’s face when he’s not trying to make it look any certain way. he loves seokjin’s face when he’s about to tell a terrible dad joke, or when he’s stuffing it full of dumplings or when he’s opening his screwed up mouth to gripe at jungkook for leaving his dirty socks on the floor. he loves seokjin’s face when he’s smiling, when he’s sad, when he’s looking at jungkook like he needs answers that only jungkook has. he loves seokjin’s face always, every minute of every day, every single way it ever looks, is the point, but he maybe especially loves it when he gets to look at it and seokjin doesn’t know that he’s being watched, doesn’t feel like he has to perform. 

jungkook is the only one who gets to see seokjin like this and that’s maybe a part, at least, of why jungkook loves seokjin’s face this way the most. 

and even though he’s not supposed to be in love with seokjin, even though he has to figure out how to make it look like he’s somehow not, now, he knows that still getting to be the only one who sees seokjin like this is something huge. something he couldn’t ever give up. 

“come here and cuddle your hyung,” seokjin says and jungkook does, big spooning for once because he’s not suited to that, he doesn’t think, he wasn’t born to be a big spoon if seokjin is here and huge, big enough to blanket jungkook and then some, but whatever seokjin asks him for, jungkook will do. 

“coming, hyung,” jungkook says, sliding back down into the sheets and shuffling over, moving into seokjin’s space and folding himself around seokjin, pulling him close. 

he holds seokjin tight, their bare skin touching in about ten different places on their bodies, their chests pressed together and their hearts beating steadily in tandem and jungkook tries to make himself think of this with a word that is not ‘home.’ 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

music helps, jungkook finds. 

now that comeback promotions have wrapped up, things move a little slower, stretch out to give him more room to be still, be by himself. 

he’d still always rather be with seokjin, but he’s getting used to this, whatever ‘this’ is. 

it’s a lot of introspection. a lot of trying to figure out why he is the way he is, why he wants the things he wants, why he does things the way he does. he never really had the time for any of that before, until something went wrong somehow and he was all but forced to reflect. luckily (or not) for him that hadn’t often been the case and so, jungkook finds, he’s kind of just been skating by. 

dissecting himself down to his smallest, most complicated parts is not exactly the most fun he’s ever had, but it feels worthwhile to look inside himself like this. to try and understand. even if it hurts, sometimes. even if he finds bits and pieces of himself that he really doesn’t like. but some of those he gets to pull to the surface and work on changing. and some he gets to learn to love. 

jungkook thinks a lot about what his 97 line friends had said, about bangtan having a kind of balance that a lot of other groups don’t always have, or have to work to find, maybe. he thinks about how even though he’d kind of assumed before that his hyungs all but carried him, when you really look at the scales of their relationships, jungkook has always found ways to pull his weight. 

seokjin has always taken care of jungkook, but jungkook has never actually needed him to. or asked him to. he lets him, but he doesn’t seek it out. 

and seokjin does something similar. he leaves spaces for jungkook, very carefully creates and protects these pockets, this place where he lets jungkook be effective for him in ways that he won’t allow anyone else. 

it took forever for jungkook to see it, because he still doesn’t totally understand it but seokjin is one of the most self deprecating people he’s ever met. what’s worse is that he’s gotten incredibly skilled at hiding it. so many people that could claim to know seokjin wouldn’t know a thing about how hard he is on himself because that runs so deep in him that he doesn’t even allow himself to do what he would see as burdening others with his shortcomings, his defects. he pushes those thoughts and feelings down deep and layers them over with an almost manic performance of over-confidence for things he doesn’t doubt himself too much on, but there’s nothing about himself he never doubts and realizing that had maybe been the first thing to teach jungkook about the nature of a broken heart. 

jungkook will never forget the very early days of the group, only a couple of months into a finally somewhat settled line-up, when seokjin had sat with jungkook in a basement dance studio and hesitantly, so very tentatively voiced his doubts, his worries. 

it was an accident, jungkook is pretty sure. seokjin had had a really bad day and he’d gone wandering through the building, looking for company and he’d found jungkook. 

back then, jungkook had been scared still, far too afraid to acknowledge anything he was feeling because that would mean stopping and stopping, then, seemed like death itself. the end of this dream. so jungkook had just kept going and going, doing and being and giving and giving. all he’d had to offer seokjin that night was his attention and the unsettled, unsure silence that other trainees wanted to mistake for arrogance. 

people always wanted to say jungkook was over confident; flippant about his abilities when he should be somehow more grateful and more prideful but humble too. 

but jungkook wasn’t all of those things, couldn’t be all of that all at once and that probably made it easier for people to hate him, which a lot of people seemed determine to do however they could justify it. and sometimes jungkook himself unwittingly contributed to that narrative by being utterly nonchalant about the kinds of things other people talked about like they were life or death. 

but the truth is, the only thing that’s ever been truly life or death for jungkook is his hyungs. 

so he could know, when it came down to it, that if there was something they needed from him or something he could do to lighten their burden or make them laugh, then he was going to do it and there was no question of that, not for jungkook. he’s not gifted, he’s not golden. he’s just a boy who would do anything for the people he loves. whatever that requires of him, however he has to achieve it. 

that night, seokjin had needed someone to listen and jungkook was the one who lucked out when it got to be him. 

and he’d been so very scared still, so tiny and terrified, always almost tremoring underneath his constant doubts, his ever mounting fears but seokjin even then was someone who soothed his trembles, who made him feel like his bumps and wrinkles were smoothed away just by being next to seokjin and so jungkook hadn’t just listened, he’d responded. 

he’d sat in the silence, in the near dark and when seokjin trailed off, he had used any inclination towards bravery that he’d ever had to push himself to pick up the dangling thread and take hold. he’d talked to seokjin about how anything he was afraid of, jungkook was scared of too. he’d told him that they were all terrified, almost always, but that only hard work and perseverance could get them through that, not some magic spell or prayer that seokjin was somehow responsible for procuring for them. there would be no shortcuts, not for them and jungkook had known then when he’d chosen this, but he’d chosen it anyway because it came with _them_. seokjin had laughed when jungkook said it, but he’d meant it to his bones when he’d said that he’d rather fail like this, with them than succeed somewhere else, with someone else on either side of him. it had been a disbelieving kind of a laugh, something like startled amazement and it didn’t matter where it came from or what it meant then, because seokjin had come in here looking like maybe he was looking for a place to cry in peace but now here he was, laughing with jungkook - laughing because of him. he’d listened, just like jungkook had and he hadn’t told jungkook that he was too young to know what he was talking about or too dumb to know anything at all and that had made jungkook feel powerful, emboldened enough to tell seokjin what he’d always wanted to tell him - that he would help him. that seokjin could lean on him when the weight of all his worries got to be too much for him to shoulder alone. 

seokjin hadn’t laughed, at that. he’d tilted his head at jungkook like he was seeing him, really and truly seeing him for the first time and then he’d put one hand on jungkook’s shoulder, warm and heavy enough that jungkook felt held down. 

“i’ll hold you up, if you let me, hyung,” jungkook had said, that night and he’d meant it. 

he has lived it, keeping his promise every day since. 

and of that, he is proud. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

they’re back in the US, which is always the most and least fun they ever have. 

the language barrier sucks and no matter how hard the rest of them are trying to catch up, they have no choice but to rely heavily on namjoon, who is already always doing so much. 

it’s terrifying and wonderful to get to experience first hand what it feels like to break out of a set of molds they’ll never escape in korea no matter what they do, but walking out onto a new playing field also means they get underestimated a lot, overlooked and treated like they’re new to this. here, jungkook feels misunderstood but lauded, feared sometimes and that’s not necessarily a pleasant experience, but going somewhere else and doing something new reminds him of the endless possibilities and feeling limitless is something jungkook gets very quickly very fond of. 

plus, they’re somehow both more scrutinised and less media-hounded when they’re here and it’s worth getting asked the same dumbass questions sixty five times if it means they only have to worry about western saesangs stalking their hotels. is it weird that jungkook is actually grateful for the level of fuckery their team has had to learn how to deal with back home, if it means that their security is all but child’s play in other countries? there’s something to be said in all of that about how it really does be your own, but jungkook doesn’t feel especially inclined towards making himself very sad today. 

which is, incidentally, why when a very loud argument breaks out in the van over who is sharing rooms this time, jungkook stays very pointedly silent. 

this is one of those brand new situations where he’s not sure when he’s allowed to act the fuck up, because previously the answer to that question was ‘always, because seokjin lets me away with murder _always_ ,’ but these days jungkook is a whole adult in training, known to himself now and capable of acting appropriately. when he must. 

plus, they’ve been in a cramped, stale-air crammed space hurtling through the fucking sky for almost an entire day and jungkook just doesn’t understand how taehyung has the energy to wrestle hoseok. 

“taegi fucking rights,” taehyung is grousing even as he struggles to keep hoseok’s wrists trapped against the window and jungkook is mostly just impressed because as much as hoseok is strong and wiry, he’s also a shameless fucking cheater so getting him pinned is always a big victory for anyone. 

but taehyung wanting to room with yoongi begs the question; 

“who are you sharing with then, hyung?” 

it’s not exactly unheard of for jimin and taehyung to not share a room, but recently it’s been trending more towards the routine. 

“i’m rooming with you, dummy,” jimin tells him and jungkook frowns, because he’s pretty sure he would remember having taken part in a conversation about this. he looks around the van for potential reinforcements but he knows even as he does it that it’s pointless, because namjoon, yoongi and seokjin are in another car behind them. 

“oh. you are?” is all jungkook can say, because he doesn’t especially mind sharing with jimin. he doesn’t mind at all, actually but he almost always ends up with seokjin and that’s … well, that’s the way jungkook likes it. 

he wonders if this is the outcome of a conversation he was intentionally left out of. he wonders if the rest of them talked about this; talked about them. he wonders if seokjin was part of the conversation. he wonders, suddenly cold all over, if this is something seokjin had asked for. 

and that thought makes jungkook disinclined to ask any more questions. 

he doesn’t say anything else before they pull up in front of their hotel and he pulls his hood up and insists on helping the manager hyungs unload their luggage instead of heading straight into the lobby with the rest of the group. he’s fine. he’s gonna be fine, he just needs a minute. 

by the time namjoon’s manager waves him off with a strange look when jungkook offers to carry his bag for him, the chances of jungkook actually puking are down to a totally manageable 7, so he dutifully joins his hyungs when he has literally no other choice but to. 

he keeps his eyes on the floor and his hands wrapped tight around the straps of his backpack while the key cards are collected and he’s kicking lightly at his own boot by the time they start to get handed out. 

“... and jungkook, you’re with -” 

“me,” jimin says, so quickly, so loudly that it makes jungkook wince. he doesn’t say anything, though, doesn’t need to make this any worse for himself than it already is, so he just keeps his head down and holds his hand out for his key. 

he opens his mouth to say ‘thank you,’ but is left stuttering around a mouthful of silence when instead of a key card, what gets placed in his hand is someone else’s hand. 

“uh, no,” seokjin says and jungkook can already hear that he’s frowning, but he sees it too when his eyes automatically lift to seokjin’s face. 

“jungkook is with me. jungkook is always with me,” seokjin is insistent. his voice is hard and his grip on jungkook’s hand is tight. he’s not looking at the manager who is doling out the room keys, though. he’s staring down all of their bandmates in turn. he’s frowning at them and he’s clearly angry. 

seokjin hadn’t been part of the conversation about them switching rooms. 

jungkook feels like a hot air balloon that’s just been filled with a hot burst of propane. jungkook feels like he could soar. 

“we just thought -” jimin starts to explain, but he’s looking at yoongi instead of seokjin and he seems uncertain and that’s all that needs to be said, really. 

“well don’t,” seokjin snaps, taking a pair of room keys, “don’t do my thinking for me. jungkook - do you want to room with hyung?” 

it takes jungkook a second to catch up and respond, because he’s so very rarely heard seokjin get angry like this that he’s still caught up in wonder at that and also because he can’t actually believe that’s even a question. 

“yeah, i. of course i do,” he says, because he does. he always does. 

“good,” seokjin says, voice still sharp and his grip on jungkook’s hand only getting tighter. “that’s decided then. by me and jungkook. is everyone else okay with that?” he says like he’s daring someone to raise an objection and jungkook knows none of the rest of them can say a word because jin never pulls rank as the eldest, he’s not even doing it now, but he’s making it clear that in this moment he’s not to be fucked with and that’s terrifying when it’s coming from someone who generally is very on board with being fucked with and enjoyable to fuck with, besides. 

with one last shell shocked glance at the rest of the hyungs, all of whom are looking either chastised (yoongi, jimin) or lost (everyone else) jungkook lets himself be tugged away towards the elevators. 

it’s empty, just the two of them in there together and as soon as the doors close jungkook turns to look at seokjin. 

“i know,” seokjin says immediately, even though jungkook didn’t say a thing. he sighs. “i’ll apologize to them. i shouldn’t have - i just.” his eyes cut away from jungkook’s face and he shakes his head. 

“i think they just wanted …” jungkook doesn’t have to defend what they did. he hates what they were trying to do, honestly, but that’s on him, not them. “it’s okay if you need a break from me, hyung.” just because jungkook doesn’t like that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. 

he knows he makes things difficult for seokjin sometimes. moreso lately. if ever it gets to the point where he takes more from seokjin than he gives him, he’d want seokjin to push him away. even if that would hurt, even though that would hurt more than anything. 

what seokjin needs is always going to be more important than what jungkook wants. 

that’s never been a question for jungkook. not ever. he’s not sure how good a job he’s done at showing seokjin that, but he’s going to step that effort up from now on. he has to, now that he’s no longer sure that seokjin would show him or tell him if something jungkook is doing was hurting him. he has to listen more carefully, look harder for any sign that seokjin is suffering because of him because jungkook won’t be able to live with himself if he misses those warnings; if he lets that happen. 

“you know that i don’t - i wouldn’t … you know i’m not your responsibility, right hyung?” as terrified of the answer as jungkook is, he needs seokjin to know that. jungkook needs to know that seokjin knows it. 

he’s expecting seokjin to laugh and start lecturing him about all the money he’s spent on buying food for him, to start squawking about how he’s raised jungkook like a wild tamagotchi because that’s a familiar script here and seokjin acts it out regularly, especially when he’s uncomfortably close to being genuinely emotional and trying to avoid that. he’s pretty worked up right now so jungkook is expecting this to play out like it so often does. he’s expecting to have to strong arm seokjin into a real, honest answer and he’s prepared to do it. 

what he isn’t expecting or prepared for, is for seokjin to back him up into the wall of the elevator and hold him there with his hands cupping jungkook’s face, his eyes so big and his gaze so hot that for a second jungkook actually thinks seokjin is about to kiss him and his knees buckle. 

seokjin reaches for, his hands going lightning quick and instinct honed to jungkook’s arms. 

seokjin holds him up. 

“you’ve never for even one day of this been my responsibility,” seokjin says and it hits jungkook harder than a kiss. “you’re mine because i want you to be, jungkook.” 

jungkook can’t think, can’t move, can barely breathe and it’s a good thing because if he could do anything, he’d do something incredibly fucking stupid like step forward and kiss seokjin or more likely - drag seokjin down into him and kiss him that way, instead. 

and as much as probably 78% of jungkook’s waking thoughts directly involve getting to kiss seokjin, this is bigger than that. this is better than that, because seokjin just said … seokjin just called him - 

“yours?” he asks because he wants to hear it again. he needs to hear seokjin say it one more time. “am i yours, hyung?” 

and it doesn’t even matter that he doesn’t mean it the way jungkook wishes he did, because - 

“yeah. yes, jungkook. you’re mine. and hyung is yours, too.” 

jungkook’s stupid traitorous eyes are stinging again and he always knew that the idol life would make him cry a lot but he never thought it would go quite like this. 

“i know it’s not … i know that that means different things for the two of us, in some ways. but there are ways where it means the same thing too, right?” seokjin seems to be searching for something in jungkook’s still wet eyes and if jungkook knew what it was he’d show it to him, but in the absence of that knowledge he’s perfectly content to just show seokjin everything that’s inside of him and let him figure out for himself if what he needs is in there, in jungkook somewhere. 

“i want to be yours, hyung,” jungkook says and it’s easy to say because isn’t that what he’s always been saying, all this time? “i want you to be mine.” even if he never gets to have seokjin the way he wants him - all the ways he wants him - he won’t turn down some form of it, some kind of connection that they have that sets them apart, that makes them a ‘them.’ 

“good,” seokjin says, decisive; sharp like he’d been downstairs, “then i am. and you are. and that’s our business. if you’re happy then i’m happy and that’s all that matters.” 

jungkook has no way of knowing how deep this runs for seokjin. he wants to hear what seokjin is saying to him and know that it’s huge to him the same way it is for jungkook, but he can’t and it could be so small, it could be this tiny, inconsequential add-on for seokjin. he could be saying that he likes jungkook a little more than he likes the rest of them sometimes, or that he wants to spend more time with jungkook than he does with the other hyungs and that still doesn’t mean that jungkook is his favourite person period, that’s still so fucking little compared to what jungkook wants to mean to seokjin because it’s not even a fraction of what seokjin means to jungkook. but seokjin says the word “mine” like he means it and jungkook can’t find it in himself to care beyond that. the extent and depth and exact meaning of it can just fuck off for right now because hearing that word come from seokjin’s mouth makes jungkook feel like he could do anything, be anything, survive _this_ and that’s enough. for now, that can be enough. 

the elevator doors open on their floor then and seokjin steps back, steps away. 

he turns to step out but before he does he looks back at jungkook over his shoulder and holds out a hand to him, waits for him. 

jungkook takes his hand and follows. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 

seokjin apologizes for the way he’d spoken to them in the hotel lobby, but everyone waves him off and yoongi and jimin apologize for meddling, even if yoongi’s attempt at an apology is just a grunt added onto jimin’s actual apology. 

once again everyone is giving seokjin and jungkook a wide berth but this time it doesn’t suck. instead of it seeming like everyone thinks they’re an oil fire waiting to happen, this feels more like reassessment. reconfiguration. every once in a while something will shift significantly in their group dynamic, an argument or an event revealing a new thread of how they relate to one another and everyone takes some time to re-settle afterwards. 

this time it doesn’t feel like punishment for jungkook. 

it’s something more like acknowledgement and jungkook tries not to preen too obviously. 

he throws himself into all the appearances they’ve got lined up this visit; lets himself let loose now that something bigger has been settled for him. 

his joy is genuine and the song they’re promoting this time around goes deep for jungkook so it’s easy, it’s natural to give this his all. 

seokjin is smiling more, not tensed up like he had been and that of course can mean only one thing. 

he goes viral again. 

this time, for having wrists. 

it’s always hilarious when the whole world loses their shit about some incredibly mundane thing one of them does, but this one really, really amuses jungkook. all seokjin did was wear a shirt that didn’t quite fall down as far as his hands, cuffed off halfway down his forearms instead and people - both fans and non fans alike - are full wilding. jungkook loves to see it, he truly does. 

“hyung, namjoon hyung. what does this one say?” all afternoon jungkook has been mining stan twitter for the most rt’d tweets hashtagged (so poetically) simply #ohwrists and making namjoon translate them for him. 

jungkook is - and he cannot stress this enough - having the time of his fucking life. 

namjoon squints at the phone jungkook has just thrust into his face. 

“they want to, ah. they want seokjin hyung to fist them until his arm gets stuck inside them forever. they want hyung to … i think ‘wear them’ would be the best way to translate it?” 

jungkook laughs so hard he cries. 

“i’m glad you’re having fun,” seokjin says, somewhat hysterically, from where he’s sitting pale-faced with his arms crossed over his chest. he has the sleeves of his jacket pulled down far enough to almost completely cover his hands and he’s glaring at his phone where it sits untouched on the table in front of him. he always gets like this when he’s inopportunely reminded that millions of people the world over would pay obscene amounts of money to have him do some incredibly fucked up shit to them. 

jungkook can’t relate. 

to seokjin, that is. 

jungkook can absolutely relate to those millions of people, because - mood, honestly. 

“ah you just don’t get it, hyung,” jungkook tries to explain, still wiping away his tears. “is it the generational gap?” 

seokjin gets up from his seat and jungkook gets instantly excited about the impending beat down he’s got to look forward to. 

twenty minutes later, he’s sweaty and breathless and wrapped around seokjin, somehow both on top of and underneath him at the same time and seokjin is finally laughing, which feels like a win even if he’s laughing at jungkook tripping over his own feet as he half-heartedly tried to run away from him. 

“i’m just saying, kids these days could find a nicer way to express their affections,” seokjin picks up their earlier conversation like it hadn’t been derailed by him wrestling jungkook to the floor over several different pieces of furniture, “is it really so difficult to say ‘i like him’?” 

jungkook huffs, mostly out of disdain but also because he’s a little out of breath. seokjin blinks at him and then re-adjusts his hold, spreads his legs in a way that he probably means to be helpful but that actually just makes it harder for jungkook to breathe because now seokjin is mostly in his lap and pinning jungkook’s torso to the floor with his shoulders. jungkook isn’t as flexible as seokjin is and also he’s super fucking gay for seokjin so all in all, not an ideal arrangement. 

“i told you it was an age thing, hyung,” jungkook stubbornly insists. “‘fist me’ is the new ‘ilu’.” 

seokjin peers down into jungkook’s face like he’s monitoring him for signs of a concussion. 

“i can’t tell if this is a you-specific thing or if you’re merely a tragic product of your hopeless generation. real romantic feelings are valid, jeon jungkook. being a fuckboy is just your own personal choice.” 

which, ouch. 

“ouch, hyung,” jungkook pouts for added effect. “but also - i fucking wish. i wish i had either the time or opportunities to be a fuckboy.” which, tragically, jungkook does not have, because seokjin steadfastly refuses to give jungkook the time of day _or_ his dick. sickening. not to mention selfish. 

“yeah yeah yeah,” seokjin sighs, starting to detangle them and standing up to brush himself off. “you’re a walking boner and real feelings are for weird old losers. we know, 'guk. trust me, we all know your stance on this issue.” 

and maybe, just maybe jungkook has been too loudly making fun of vmin for being the grossest and most lovely couple of all time, again. he makes a mental note to tell them he supports their spectacularly nauseating love more often, just in case they actually think he wouldn’t defend their beautiful gay love with his dying breath. 

because how shitty would it be for them to think any less than that of him? jungkook barely conceals his shudder. 

“hey hyung,” jungkook slings his arm around seokjin’s neck, “i found this porn twitter that’s just clips of dudes that look like you railing dudes that look like me, wanna see?” the ‘and then reenact every clip on there and get married after in an obnoxiously extravagant ceremony attended by all our nearest and dearest’ goes unsaid, but it’s still pretty loud if you ask jungkook. 

seokjin pushes jungkook off him and he isn’t gentle about it at all, but the look of disappointment and horror he levels at jungkook is, at least, mild at best. 

“i’m getting a child lock putting on your phone, just you fucking wait,” seokjin vows and jungkook sticks his tongue out at him because he is the very pinnacle of maturity; a vision of perfected adulthood. 

later that day when he’s dicking around online and checking out new music, he loses like an hour to listening to the new harry styles song on repeat. jungkook has always admired harry’s voice but his solo work is especially inspiring to him personally. the artistic and stylistic choices he makes seem so brave to jungkook, who envies him that freedom and that courage. 

the lyrics to ‘adore you’ stick with jungkook for a long time and he thinks about sending the song to seokjin, but he has no idea what he’d say about that or how he’d explain why he wanted seokjin to hear it without straight up saying “listen to this, someone else wrote a song that sounds to me like something i could have written for you, isn’t that cool?” 

if seokjin listened to the song and looked up the translated lyrics, he wouldn’t find it cool at all, jungkook is sure, so he dismisses the thought almost as quickly as it occurs to him. 

he sends seokjin a fisting meme instead and congratulates himself on an interpersonal exchange well executed. 

fisting memes say exactly the same thing as the harry styles song does, just in a more lowkey way. memes are chill. they’re cute. they’re not all poetically thirsty in the try hard, wandering the moors kind of way that love songs are and jungkook needs to shoot for balance on that. 

part of this new undertaking to become a better person means being far more careful about how he communicates what he feels to seokjin. he’s still striving to be completely open with seokjin because he doesn’t want to imagine what any alternative to that looks like, but he knows now that there are things he can say and things he should keep to himself. anything he needs to say to seokjin, he knows he can and won’t try to censor that. but there are things seokjin doesn’t need to know - things seokjin would prefer not to know, probably - and jungkook will respect that. 

the fact that jungkook is in love with seokjin falls very clearly into that latter category, so jungkook cuts those thoughts loose as quickly and as cleanly as he can. seokjin told him he didn’t want to hear that before jungkook even got a chance to say it once and that’s something jungkook tries hard to see as a good thing. if it’s better this way for seokjin then it’s what’s best for the both of them. 

it doesn’t change how jungkook feels, but not having to hear it has to make things easier for seokjin, right? 

it better, because as usual, that’s jungkook’s entire motivation. 

seokjin responds to jungkook’s heartfelt fisting meme with a series of question marks intermixed with exclamation marks and that’s good, that’s normal. 

seokjin is confused and maybe hysterical but he’s texting jungkook back and if jungkook finds seokjin staring blank-faced at his hands a little too often when they’re getting ready for bed that night, then that’s just hilarious honestly and once they’re laughing and joking they’re okay, right? 

they’re going to be okay. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/


	6. heart is now an earthquake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘can’t’ is namjoon and seokjin and yoongi and hoseok and jimin and taehyung suffering because of jungkook. 
> 
> ‘can’t’ is the conclusion of this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for this chapter: there's a brief mention of disordered eating at one point. a tiny thing, but it's there nonetheless.

if jungkook hadn’t already been pretty set on the idol life for about a billion reasons besides, a pretty fucking motivating one would be that he’ll never have to wonder what it looked like to bystanders when he wrestled with seokjin just to have an excuse to get his hands on him, or wish that he somehow had access to four hundred pictures of himself sitting on seokjin’s lap, half of them gifs, some of them full video clips, all of them helpfully and even chronologically compiled in a single, glorious edit. 

in other words, army have jungkook’s back. even when they’re probably not trying to. 

“i fucking love our fans,” he says out loud one day when he’s just finished cleaning up and re-organizing his jinkook playlist on youtube. he’s been meaning to get around to it for a while now and it’s taken him the guts of three days to get through his ‘watch later’ playlist and clear out the videos that have tragically been deleted, gone but not forgotten; ethereal in jungkook’s eyes and immortalized in his heart. 

“me too,” namjoon says automatically and then instantly moves on to staring off into space, probably working on his next UN speech already. namjoon doesn’t know how not to change the whole fucking world with his love and jungkook loves that about him. 

“same, obviously. but what inspired this confession today?” hoseok wants to know. 

they’re getting worked over after a performance at an awards show. jungkook can see their line of trophies even when he’s face down on a massage bed with his calf cramps getting brutally, relentlessly driven from his body and it makes him smile. 

“they’re just so creative. like … the fact that they love us at all is beautiful as is, but they work so hard to make it prettier, to be good and get better at it, somehow. ‘s inspiring,” jungkook closes his eyes, winces for a particularly determined knot of tension that doesn’t seem to want to leave his thigh. 

“... are you reading fanfiction again?” hoseok asks and jungkook only laughs. silly hyung. cute, lovely, talented hyung. 

all of jungkook’s hyungs are pretty cool, actually. 

but seokjin goes above and beyond, as usual. claims an entire brand new category just for himself. 

and the next day when jungkook comes across a couple of shots of them from last night where jungkook is trying valiantly not to cry onstage and yoongi is holding his hand in a death grip with one hand, clinging to their trophy with the the other and seokjin is looking at them from across the mic stand, so fucking fond that the look in his eyes makes jungkook want to cry now, today, he can’t help but save them and message them on to seokjin. 

‘you look so full of love hyung. like a big ass care bear. hot as fuck and ready to cry about his feelings. ♥_______♥’ he texts and then locks his phone, dropping it on his chest and sighing, pretty fucking full of love himself. 

‘you’re a mean kid,’ seokjin texts back and jungkook rolls his eyes but doesn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day. 

he sets a close up crop of one of the pictures as his lock screen. 

seokjin wrinkles his nose and punches him, when he sees it. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

taehyung finds jungkook pretzeled up in a corner of the kind-of library they have now, one airpod in and a random spotify playlist going while he reads. 

they don’t really tend to spend a lot of time in here, mostly because they don’t spend a lot of time at home period but also because when they do, they’re sleeping, eating, showering or trying to do two of those things at once. 

“broadening your literary horizons?” taehyung asks, crossing his legs and plopping down onto the floor next to jungkook. 

jungkook is always trying to broaden his horizons, he thinks. not in any kind of concentrated way or with anything like the cohesive effort namjoon puts into it. not throwing himself into every new fascination that he finds whole-heartedly, the way taehyung does, either. it’s just a small and quiet constant for jungkook. listening to new music until he finds something that snags his attention. picking up every book he comes across until he finds one he can’t put down. he feels silly comparing the way he has a list of artists and paintings and movies and designers and quotes and lyrics he hears and wants to look up later in the notes of his phone to how hoseok spends days sometimes, studying different genres of dance and dragging jimin to the studio to learn them with him, working to understand with their bodies. seokjin has a college degree already and is pursuing his interests at a graduate level now, which blows jungkook’s mind. yoongi has devoted himself so wholly to their craft that he does it for other artists now, has made a name for himself industry wide for being one of the best at what he does. 

and jungkook, in comparison, is just jungkook. 

he’s infinitely interested in new things and he’ll get kind of hyper focused on something sometimes; photography and editing the one thing that he has carried on into his every day but just one of many mini obsessions he’s picked up and mostly discarded along the way. 

he doesn’t know how his hyungs have the time or the energy, honestly, when even keeping up with the breadcrumb trail of his interests that stretches like a too-thin thread through everything else he has to do, everything else that’s required of him, feels like so much, sometimes. his therapist tells him that sometimes just existing in the world as who he is and learning to be okay with that is enough, and jungkook is trying to remember that. 

“m’just reading, hyung,” jungkook tells taehyung. because that is all he’s doing. it doesn't have to be more. 

“sure, 'guk-ah,” taehyung says, eyeing the book - one of yoongi’s, a really interesting read on municipal architectural styles in ancient rome - but not saying any more. “how come you’re in here by yourself though? joonie and hobi are working on lyrics in yoongi’s room. and jin and minnie are making a bomb ass stew for dinner when they can take a break from trying to out-sing one another.” 

taehyung kind of has a point, because it wouldn’t be strange for jungkook to slot himself into either of those impromptu group activities. no one would be at all surprised to find him flitting between the two, because he’d be perfectly at home in both. 

but instead he’s here, alone and taehyung had come to find him, because that’s what’s strange. this is a surprising choice for him to have made. 

“i’m good here,” jungkook says and it’s what he wanted to be able to say, but he finds that it’s true, too. he’s working on spending time by himself and being okay with that. he’s trying to be independent, to not need anyone besides himself or anything beyond his own abilities and it’s good, he finds. he wouldn’t like it to be this way always, but it’s nice in small doses. he gets something from this. he feels better somehow, after. different in a good way. 

“okay, bub,” taehyung says, getting up and poking jungkook in the cheek as he goes, trying to stick his finger in jungkook’s mouth because that’s just the kind of person he is, “but you know where we are if you change your mind, hm?” 

jungkook nods, because he does. 

“it’s nice to spend time by yourself, but you don’t ever have to be alone. not if that’s not what you want. you know that, right?” taehyung asks before he leaves and jungkook smiles up at him, smiles until the look on taehyung’s face gets loose and easy, free like he should always look when he’s here at home with them. 

“i know, hyung,” jungkook assures him and it’s easy to do. 

jungkook wants to get good at being by himself, but he knows that doesn’t mean he’ll ever be alone. 

he wouldn’t ever choose to be, not all the time, not when he could be with his hyungs instead. 

time spent by himself is no great trial for him and he learns from it, he gets comfortable being alone with himself and enjoying that, using it to his benefit. 

but it’s not the same as basking in the company of his best friends instead. 

it’s not as good as spending time with seokjin, his very best friend and his something else - his everything, maybe - too. 

but it’s good. it’s new and unlike everything else that’s new to jungkook, it’s not bad and it does not hurt, so jungkook goes with it. 

good is more than he’d hoped for. 

good isn’t ‘the best’, it’s not what he’d been shooting for, but it’s not jungkook gritting his teeth and bearing down to get through it, either, so he’ll take it and he’ll be grateful for it. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

things have been going pretty well for jungkook lately. he and seokjin are good, he’s been getting enough sleep, he’s had plenty of time to work out and eat well and see his friends and call his parents. 

he is, in short, living the good life. 

which is why he’s not even in the slightest bit surprised when everything in a single instant goes to absolute shit. 

they’re recording this week, which is normally jungkook’s very favourite way to spend time. 

his favourite place used to be the dance studio for a while and then it was his own studio but now it’s whatever space they’re using together or have converted into some semblance of what they need to record the notes of what they’re working on. 

this time around it’s an actual studio and they’re working with their own producers so jungkook is about as comfortable as he’s ever been for this part of the process. 

he gets too comfortable, is the problem. 

he gets so fucking complacent about the fact that him and seokjin are good right now that he lets it make him feel confident enough to pull up that horrifically, unparalleledly personal track he’d started working on when everything fell apart for him, because of them. 

all it takes is seokjin throwing jungkook the crumb of a “you’re mine,” statement that he didn’t even explain the reason for or depth of and jungkook is listening to love songs again, jungkook is saying what he means and telling seokjin what he wants and he’s not stupid enough to think he’ll ever ever get it but he is stupid enough to think that because he feels okay right now, because he finally feels like he can breathe again, everything will surely be fine forever. 

seokjin is back by his side and it’s so almost like the way things were when jungkook still had hope that he looks at his heart, shattered apart but held in place by tape and glue and thinks ‘ha! you’re still beating! we’re still in this! i did it! i made it!’ 

it’s so small a victory but jungkook treats it like he’s standing on the peak of mount everest because he didn’t think he’d ever come back from this at all and he hasn’t, not yet, but he got somewhere, he survived it and that makes him stupidly, stupidly brave. 

it’s awful, listening to the sound of what it felt like to lose everything. 

it hurts just as much now as it did when he was piecing it together but what makes it pure torture for him is that he makes the mistake of sending it on to namjoon for notes. that’s what jungkook does with everything he makes, so it was simply instinct that made him do it with this one too, but he really hadn’t been prepared for namjoon to both like the track and lean heavily on him to finish it. he hadn’t thought about what he’d do when namjoon tells him “you’re onto something, guk. dig into this.” 

so now jungkook finds himself forcibly back in a headspace where he’s consciously thinking about what it feels like to have lost seokjin, to be heartbroken without him and now he can’t think about anything else because namjoon asked him to do this for _them_. 

he wakes up next to seokjin and makes himself think about what it would be like to wake up alone and know that it was going to be that way for the rest of his life. to know, all the while, that seokjin was waking up somewhere else, next to someone who - unlike jungkook - could make him happy. and he’d forced himself to do this when he’d first had to let go of seokjin, but he’d been at rock bottom then, or he’d thought he had been, at least. he’d been numb, then. he’d been so panicked, so hurt that he hadn’t felt what these thoughts do to him, not really. or maybe it’s just worse now because he made himself think about what it would be like to never have seokjin again but then seokjin came back to him, in bits in pieces, some days, in some ways and losing him once almost broke jungkook but just the thought of losing him a second time makes jungkook certain that having to go through that would kill him. 

he lives his every day now examining a version of every minute of it that plays out exactly the same, only minus seokjin. 

it’s easy. 

and that’s what hurts the most. 

it’s really fucking easy to imagine what it would feel like to live without seokjin because every single day since he knew he’d never get to have him, he’s lived exactly that, in some moments and in the worst and longest hours. in fits and starts. to some degree and never completely, but always at least a little bit. 

he’s constantly aware now of how he has seokjin less in some way, just as much in another but always less overall, always less and less and less still. 

it’s a dwindling balance now; a downward count that jungkook doesn’t think he’ll ever be unaware of again and that’s what makes it easy to scrape together all the very worst parts of these recent days and combine them into one larger, terrible picture; one from which seokjin is absent entirely. wholly. 

he locks himself in bathrooms sometimes, just to cry about the awful possibilities that he’s sketching out in excruciating detail for his art, for this career of his that he has to commit to fully, for not just himself but for all of them. for seokjin. 

and then he locks himself in the recording booth and falls the fuck apart. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

he’s in there for hours, re-doing the same vocal track time and time and time again and fucking it up in a hundred uniquely shitty ways. 

it’s like his voice just won’t do what he wants it to. it’s like his head is so full of other things he wants to say that he can’t make what he needs to say come out. no matter what he does, he can’t make it work. 

jungkook can’t make it work. 

and this has never happened to him before. 

he had no idea what this would feel like because he didn’t know he could find himself here. it’s the second worst thing he’s ever experienced in his life. and he brought himself here. he reduced himself to this, because he can’t let go of the other most painful moment he’s ever lived through. jungkook’s fear of losing seokjin reminds him, in this moment, that he could lose everything else. and seokjin too. 

jungkook stands staring at the pop filter in front of the mic and falls to pieces. over and over again. for hours. 

in the end, pdogg waves him out and hands him a bottle of water, tells him they can try again tomorrow and jungkook doesn’t know how to have this conversation, jungkook has never experienced this before, he’s never ever had this happen to him and he’s already on the verge of frustrated, terrified tears when seokjin stands up from the couch he must have been sitting on while he waited for his turn to lay vocal tracks. 

jungkook deflates. whatever is going on inside of him gets quieter, seems almost manageable for a second and maybe if he can just get to seokjin, maybe if seokjin will let jungkook come close and hold him there, just for a moment, maybe jungkook will be okay again. 

jungkook doesn’t need seokjin to love him. he knows he can’t have that, he suspects he doesn’t deserve it, but he wants so much still and maybe that’s okay if all he really needs from seokjin is for seokjin to be there. 

“oh hyung. i’m sorry, i didn’t know you were waiting, i didn’t see you, i’m sorry i -” and jungkook doesn’t actually know how he intended to finish that sentence but he’ll never get the chance to find out now, because seokjin cuts him off. 

“it’s fine,” he says and he’s not looking at jungkook. 

“it doesn’t matter, it’s not like i was busy, i just called out of an exam to be here,” he says and then he pushes past jungkook and he doesn’t touch him apart from where his shoulder hits jungkook’s hard and his jaw is clenched and he’s …. he’s angry. he’s angry at jungkook. 

“hyung,” jungkook says, turning to go after him, desperate to get to him, to tell him he’s sorry, but seokjin puts his hand on jungkook’s chest and pushes him back. pushes him away. 

“save it, jungkook. i don’t have time to hear this.” 

he steps into the booth and closes the door firmly behind him. he doesn’t look up or look back at jungkook, just picks up the headphones and starts sorting through his pages. 

jungkook looks at pdogg and pdogg looks right back at him. 

“he’s … probably just stressed? college is hard work jungkook, that’s all. he didn’t mean that, he’s just tired or something.” 

from inside the booth, seokjin speaks. 

“are you ready hyung?” he asks, looking only at pdogg, who glances at jungkook one last time before he sits back down in front of the board and presses the comm button to tell seokjin he’ll just be a second. 

jungkook stares at seokjin, standing under the spotlight in the center of the booth, brightly lit and beautiful and so plainly, coldly furious. he looks so very far away. 

jungkook bolts. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

jungkook doesn’t stop half walking, half running until he’s far enough away that he can’t hear anything or anyone else. 

he collapses against a wall in an empty, silent corridor and slides down it until he hits the floor. 

he puts his head in his hands but he’s too upset to cry, he’s feeling too much to do anything. 

what if he’s broken now? what if he’s let himself fall so far into his own head that he’ll never get back out again, never find his voice the way it sounded before? 

because it sounds crazy - it sounds utterly fucking impossible - but it _feels_ so much more than simply possible. it feels inevitable. 

jungkook’s voice inside of himself is a screaming, bleeding thing. it is inconsolable. because jungkook has unlocked the part of himself that held his deepest, darkest, very worst fear. and now he is uncontrollable in his grief.

he’s guaranteed to have seokjin by his side for - what? a couple years more? and then he’ll go off to serve his military duties and jungkook will have a shadow of him, one single thread stretched too far, pulled thin. 

and before that even happens, before seokjin has to go anywhere, who knows how much more of him jungkook will already have lost in the meantime, in this brand new place he finds them in where he’s never sure what he is and isn’t allowed to ask for or what he can and can’t ever hope to have? because seokjin has given him some hints and jungkook has worked out a couple more all by himself but he still … he never fucking _knows_ anymore and before all of this, all seokjin was for him was certainty. 

seokjin was jungkook’s absolute and now he’s staring down the more and more likely seeming possibility that seokjin will be for him absolute only in absence. 

maybe the next year of their lives will mean nothing more than a steady erosion of what jungkook thought he knew about seokjin, what jungkook could hope to get keep of him and then seokjin will go off to the military and he’ll come back an entirely different person and jungkook won’t know him at all anymore and that will be so, so much worse than just never knowing what it’s like to have seokjin love him. 

jungkook has learned so much about himself lately. 

he knows himself better now and the sum of what he has discovered is this: 

he could live without seokjin. 

he could survive a life that doesn’t involve seokjin. 

he learned how to live alongside him and he’s learning now who he is besides him so he could learn to live without him, too. 

but here’s the kicker. 

here’s the part that follows a drum roll. 

here’s the most important thing jungkook has learned about who he is; 

he doesn’t fucking want to. 

probably, his life would be fine if from here on out he just let seokjin keep drifting at his side, a constant here and then gone and then back again and far away but not too distant flux that’s probably not untypical of relationships that people survive and thrive in every single day. 

probably, it’s unreasonable of jungkook to want to be certain about seokjin. because hasn’t seokjin given him enough? hasn’t seokjin given him more than most people get? shouldn’t that be enough? 

it’s not. what this is is not enough for jungkook, not when it comes to seokjin. 

he came to terms with not having him all, not having all of him always. 

but he can’t accept the possibility that eventually, inevitably even, he won’t have seokjin at all. 

and that’s the way things are trending. their relationship keeps changing, the line keeps moving and fading out and disappearing completely and every time it fills in again somewhere new it’s closer to jungkook and keeps seokjin further from him. 

life is chipping slowly away at all the possibilities that jungkook needed to believe were guarantees and even though seokjin is every day by his side, everything that happens around them pushes him further away and gives jungkook a glimpse into a future where seokjin doesn’t come close anymore. 

and that’s not enough for him. 

jungkook could survive that, but he refuses to. 

he’s supposed to take that and be grateful, but he knows in the very depths of himself that he can’t. 

and ‘can’t’ is new to him. 

‘can’t’ is today in the studio when jungkook’s voice won’t cooperate because his feelings are loud enough to drown out everything else. 

‘can’t’ is seokjin angry with him and pushing jungkook away when he isn’t capable of the only thing jungkook knows for sure seokjin needs from him. 

‘can’t’ is tomorrow in the studio when jungkook’s parts get given to someone who can. 

‘can’t’ is a version of bangtan where jungkook is carried, jungkook is a liability that must be compensated for by others. 

‘can’t’ is a bangtan strained by that. 

‘can’t’ is namjoon and seokjin and yoongi and hoseok and jimin and taehyung suffering because of jungkook. 

‘can’t’ is the conclusion of this. 

‘can’t’ is the end of everything. 

‘can’t’ is this feeling right here. it’s the knowledge that there’s something jungkook cannot be for seokjin when that isn’t just something seokjin wants, it’s the only thing seokjin needs, it’s all that they’ve ever actually asked of him. 

because jungkook’s personal feelings aside, jungkook _can’t_ put his personal feelings aside and it’s effecting his career now - it’s affecting their careers. 

so what does that mean for them? what does that make him? 

he fell in love with seokjin and he couldn’t have him, not the way he wanted and that was one thing, that was something he brought himself to terms with. but now he’s facing down a life of only ever having seokjin in less and less ways, losing him constantly, over and over again and he wants to be able to survive that if that’s what seokjin and bangtan need from him, but he can’t. 

today is what has come of that - jungkook can’t. 

and if he has to keep facing more of this, more of the same? if he has years ahead of him to torture himself with all the ways he has lost seokjin while he drives seokjin further way because of that, this will only get worse. jungkook will get worse. he’ll be less and less useful to them all, he’ll become their responsibility to manage and if he’s that, to them, he won’t be holding seokjin up anymore, he won’t be lessening any burdens for anyone else. 

jungkook can cope with one singular, even all-encompassing loss of seokjin in one sense, even if it is the biggest sense, the way jungkook wanted him most. 

he could drag himself through a life where he lost seokjin constantly, every day, in ever new and further ways. because even that would be worth it, for jungkook. some of him, even only ever less of him, was still something if seokjin would still be there in the end. 

but that loss - constant until it was absolute and coupled with the knowledge that he was hurting the rest of them? that he was no longer what they needed him to be because the loss of seokjin has broken him in a way so fundamental that he can’t be or give them what they need of him anymore? 

jungkook can live with deprivation. jungkook lives like this already. he knows loss. 

but if things go on as they are, if this continues, he won’t just have to shoulder that himself. he won’t just be someone who can’t help them achieve their goals anymore, he’ll be himself what keeps them from getting there. 

he’ll cost them their careers. 

he’ll cost seokjin his dream. 

and that. that is a fate jungkook cannot accept. 

he’s panting into the palms of his hands, inhaling the wet smell of his own sweat and his chest is so tight he thinks he might die from this, from sheer panic, before his broken heart even has the chance to take full effect. 

something happens. there’s a noise, a sensation, a bright light. 

jungkook’s phone. in his hand now, a name on the screen. 

his hyung is calling him. his brother. 

his thumb moves, pure instinct and the phone is pressed to his ear, the plastic so cold against his feverishly hot ear. 

“hyung,” jungkook gasps, “hyung, i fucked up.” 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

as fucked up as everything is, no matter how completely fucked everything ever gets, seokjin is what brings jungkook back. 

when jungkook is too tired to stand up, too weak and sleep deprived to go on, it’s seokjin’s goading smiles and ridiculous puns and careful guiding hands that make him move. 

when jungkook is lost and doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing or where he thinks he was going with something, he looks at seokjin and instantly recalibrates, automatic and pure instinct; thoughtless. effortless. sometimes he doesn’t remember where he’d been heading in the first place, ends up going somewhere new to him entirely but that doesn’t matter when seokjin is there to remind him of where he always needs to be. 

when jungkook is so happy that he doesn’t know how to get it all out, how to let the pure buzz of it bleed out into something productive, how to draw it out and bring himself back down to earth, seokjin is there like an anchor, tethering jungkook so he can’t go too far from them, so he doesn’t have to worry about getting carried away, carried off by something bigger than himself. 

when jungkook is sad, seokjin sits with him in that. he doesn’t push him to move past it or try to make him think that it was never a big enough deal to get caught up in the first place. even when it is - even when it’s jungkook crying alone because of something he read in one of namjoon’s books or sobbing over a character in a drama whose hurting hit too close too home or just seemed to jungkook like too much for one person to bear, fictional or not, good or bad or neither - seokjin just joins jungkook in it and waits it out with him, waits for him to be ready to reach for seokjin’s hand and climb back out, move on. jungkook might trip and fall into those moments on his own, but he always walks out of them at seokjin’s side. 

and even when jungkook is suffering because of seokjin, because he can’t deal with how he feels or can’t feel or shouldn’t feel about seokjin himself, it’s still seokjin he wants. 

no matter what way he feels about seokjin, he’s determined to feel it all because it is seokjin. 

and it’s fucked up probably, it has to be fucked up somehow, because even when he’s aching because seokjin is too close, too present and too much to cope with when jungkook knows he can’t have him, it’s still the thought of seokjin that makes him feel better. it’s still the promise of just getting to see seokjin’s face again that makes it okay, even when being with him is agony. even when the sight of him cuts him open and soothes like a balm all at once. 

it doesn’t have to make sense. jungkook doesn’t care that it doesn’t. 

it’s seokjin and it’s always been this way. 

it’s seokjin and jungkook will take it, whatever it is, however it comes. 

it’s seokjin and jungkook wants. 

he wants to love him, wants to hold him, wants to help him, wants to be beside him whatever he’s doing, whatever he goes through. wants him however he can have him. wants to do for him whatever he can. wants to be for him whatever he needs. he wants to love him with everything he is. wants to live every moment to show seokjin in a million different ways, every single possible way there is, that he adores him. 

it doesn’t matter that it hurts. 

that doesn’t change a damn thing, for jungkook. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

hours later, it is night time. 

jungkook lets himself in and their home is empty and all around him there is silence. 

it’s not unwelcome. 

jungkook has spent most of the evening on the phone with his brother. 

twisted up in a deserted hallway, he’d broken open and spilled his guts to his hyung. none of what he’d had to say was entirely new to or wholly shocking for junghyun to hear and he’d listened to every word jungkook had heaved into the phone without interrupting him, without asking for more. junghyun has always understood even the things jungkook couldn’t bring himself to say. those things especially, maybe. 

he hadn’t shouted or sounded shocked when jungkook had told him, quietly, still gripped by terror, that he thought he might have to leave bangtan. that - and this is somehow even worse - he thought that would be what was best for them. 

junghyun hadn’t told him he was stupid, or that he was wrong, or that he was hysterical and having a panic attack, even though he could have, because jungkook was. 

he’d simply listened. he’d let jungkook talk. 

and then he’d reminded jungkook that he loved him and that no matter what choice he made - no matter what he ever did - junghyun would love him and he would support him. 

and it was that, that gave jungkook back his breath. 

because junghyun was jungkook’s brother and they had been raised in tandem, up to a point. 

and then from there on out, they’d loved each other fiercely but from afar, because jungkook was flanked now by six other brothers, who hadn’t been there in the beginning but would be there, he knew, in the end. 

if junghyun could love jungkook no matter what, then the same had to be said for them. 

and junghyun was one of the 'starting points' jungkook's therapist always talked about. junghyun had always been for jungkook someone he could depend on, in a way different to but no more or less than he could depend on the rest of his group. junghyun and the way jungkook had taught himself to keep being honest with him was something jungkook knew he'd always have. something to rely on. a 'starting point' to fall back on, even when jungkook felt totally lost. 

today was a bad day. 

today was the worst day, in some ways and jungkook had panicked and is still panicking. jungkook is frightened because he is unsure. he found out today that he was capable of being incapable. today he faced the terrifying reality that he cannot do everything that his hyungs need him to do and jungkook is floundering. 

jungkook is lost. 

jungkook isn’t sure about anything. 

jungkook doubts, for the first time, the one thing he thought he would never have to. 

and that is tied so intrinsically, so inextricably to seokjin, to the sum of jungkook’s hopes, their collective dreams, this life. 

jungkook can’t be sure of anything. 

but jungkook has his hyungs and of them he is certain. 

because beyond him and above (and before and after) what they might need of him, they are _them_ and jungkook does not have to doubt anything about that. 

so jungkook came home. 

and here, jungkook will find new certainty. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

he’s finishing up a super late dinner when taehyung finds him and he knows instantly from just the look on taehyung’s face that something has changed. 

seokjin told them something. 

maybe he told them that jungkook fucked up in the studio today and might not ever be able to sing the way they need him to ever again because he’s a stupid, useless lovesick idiot who can pretend he isn’t heartbroken right up until he remembers and then falls the fuck apart like a badly built house of cards. 

maybe he told them that he’s sick of jungkook refusing to be his the way he wants - in a way that is always good and easily manageable and never too much and never confusing and only steadily, productively workable. 

maybe he told them that he didn’t treat jungkook with kid gloves today for the first time in uh ever and that jungkook had crumbled so completely because of it that he was probably useless now but hey they could just draft someone else in, it wasn’t like jungkook was irreplaceable, right, because he certainly wasn’t that for seokjin. 

seokjin wouldn’t say any of those things, but maybe he’d thought them. maybe he should say them, because he could. they’re all at least a little bit true. 

jungkook doesn’t know what has or hasn’t been said but he knows something was when taehyung looks at him with carefully soft eyes and holds out a too cautious hand to him. 

but jungkook is trusting them when he can’t be sure he can trust himself and so he takes the lead that taehyung offers him and follows him out of the room.

yoongi is in the living room on his knees, surrounded by what looks like the parts for at least six pieces of ikea furniture that jungkook knows they do not need. 

“come, jungkook,” yoongi says, staring up at him with solemn eyes. “help hyung.” 

and this, jungkook can do. 

and so, jungkook does. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

seokjin doesn’t come home that night. 

jungkook and yoongi stay up until it’s almost morning time, passing each other nuts and bolts and putting their heads together to try and translate instructional diagrams that must be meant for another physical realm. 

every once in a while someone else will wander in - jimin with a book, namjoon with his laptop, taehyung with his sketch pad, hobi with his earpods in. they smile at jungkook and at yoongi and compliment their work and everyone, everyone knows that this is classic ‘jungkook management.’ this is how jungkook de-stresses when he needs it most and he hadn’t been the one to figure that out, they had. very very early on in this band, it had become somehow apparent to someone that a jungkook with a physical and mental and practical puzzle to solve was a jungkook at his limit, unable to think beyond that, incapable then of putting himself through any more. 

this is the jungkook specific version of giving namjoon a potato to peel when he’s turned his mind inside out so many times for their lyrics that he’s not sure which is right way round anymore. 

this is them doing for jungkook what jungkook does when he asks hoseok to help him with a move that he knows hoseok is struggling with but won’t admit in front of the rest of them. 

jimin curls up on the sofa and smiles at jungkook over the pages of his novel the same way he smiles at jungkook over the heaped spoonfuls of food jungkook adds to jimin’s plate sometimes, a habit now that he can’t and won’t break after the years when jimin sometimes wouldn’t eat anything except what jungkook held to his mouth. 

taehyung is next to him, tongue between his teeth as he doodles something that will probably end up on a piece of clothing that jungkook will wear with pride. 

and yoongi barely looks at jungkook, even when he’s speaking directly to him, but every time he passes him something he needs he holds on to jungkook’s hand and swings it between them. he stays there, on his knees, pressed right into jungkook’s side when he should probably be in his studio or catching up on his sleep and jungkook would know all about that because he is nine times out of the ten the person carrying yoongi from one to the other or luring him home with whatever he needs to say to get him there because yoongi refuses the rest of them, but not jungkook. 

this is them showing jungkook that he is cared for in the very same way that he has all this time cared for and so carefully loved them. 

this isn’t them managing jungkook at all. 

this is them loving jungkook. 

“i fucked up, hyung,” jungkook says as they’re gathering all the left over screws together to dump into a drawer and forget about forever. 

“no there’s always pieces left over, kook, that doesn’t mean -” yoongi thinks he’s talking about the furniture and that makes sense because jungkook hasn’t spoken to acknowledge anything else all night. 

“not this. in the studio earlier, i - i fucked up. and i’m scared. hyung, what if i fuck up again? what if all i can do from now on is fuck up?” this is both less than jungkook had said to junghyun on the phone and much more than jungkook has ever been able to say to yoongi, to any of these hyungs. “what if i can’t be what you need me to be?” 

it feels like it bruises his mouth just to say. it stings and it hurts and jungkook is so scared still but yoongi is blinking at him and namjoon is watching them both from the couch and jungkook trusts them more than he trusts himself. jungkook trusts them when he can’t trust himself. 

“we just need you to be you, jungkook,” yoongi says, slow like he’s thinking as he’s speaking, “we don’t need you to ‘be’ anything, or do anything. we just need you.” 

namjoon slants a smile at jungkook, a soft and small thing and something settles in jungkook. something falls into place in a way that makes everything else that’s going on inside of him seem suddenly so very inconsequential, in comparison. 

“we all have shitty days in the studio. probably half the days i have in the studio are shitty somehow, but it’s still good, right? it’s still enough?” yoongi isn’t asking at all and jungkook loves that about him. jungkook loves him so much that it keeps him upright, keeps him moving and walking and talking on the days when he doesn’t want to do any of that, even on the days when he couldn’t if it was just for him. and that’s how yoongi feels about him. that’s how they all feel about jungkook. 

“more than, hyung,” jungkook says, realizing slowly, painfully that that’s what they’d tell him if he asked the same question. 

“you -” jungkook doesn’t quite know how to put what he’s trying to say, so this attempt will be clumsy, he’s stumbling through it, but that doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting it out does. “you’ll all love me no matter what, right? even if i fuck up more, even if i make things hard for you sometimes, you’ll still want me, right?” 

he’s crying now, but that’s okay. it’s okay because yoongi is wrapping his arms up around jungkook’s shoulders and namjoon is off the couch and holding them both, now. 

“if you lost your voice tomorrow, or decided you never wanted to sing again, or hated dancing and wanted to join rap line and all of a sudden sucked at rapping, none of that would matter. it wouldn’t change anything, jungkook. you’re so talented,” namjoon says into jungkook’s hair and he’s crying too and jungkook can hear it in his voice but he can feel it in the tears falling onto the back of his neck too, “you are so fucking talented and we’re grateful for everything you do with us, but it only counts when you want to. when you mean it. that’s what makes it what it is, jungkook. that you want to give us your voice is what makes it magic, guk.” 

“and if that changes, we’ll just change too,” yoongi adds, like it’s simple. because to them, it is. 

“so if sing like shit from now on, you won’t kick me out of bangtan?” jungkook tries to make it sound light, tries to stop his hands from shaking on yoongi’s back. 

“i don’t think you could sing like shit if you tried, bun, but whatever you can give us, we’ll make work. we’ll make great. don’t we always?” 

namjoon has seen jungkook at his worst and jungkook forgets that sometimes because he wants to be able to forget that there was a time when he was ever not always able to give them what they deserved from him; what he wanted to be able to give them. but that time was very real and it was a much longer stretch in their history than these recent golden and blessed but still so few years where jungkook has honed himself to be what he thought they wanted him to be. 

“we only need you to be you. nothing else matters,” yoongi says like he can hear jungkook’s thoughts and jungkook smiles and hides his mouth against yoongi’s shoulder. 

“i think i might need some time to figure out how to be me, maybe. in some ways that i don’t know how to be, yet. but that’s okay, isn’t it? you won’t mind if it takes me a little longer to figure it out?” the freedom that they give him to be the way he needs to be hasn’t yet reached this one part of himself, the place where he has let himself grow to be who he needs to be once that’s always in line with what he thinks the people around him want from him too. it’s a small hold out. a tiny territory that jungkook had been too afraid to try and claim for himself. but it’s the last barrier for him to tackle now and that changes things. 

he’s a mess sometimes and that’s always been the case, but he can see now that if he keeps trying to ignore it when he steps in it, it’ll lead only to moments like today; when all the small things pile up to try and consume him. he realizes now that he doesn’t have to just survive that. he can face it and overcome it before it ever gets anywhere close to that point. if he can just learn how to accept himself when he isn’t perfect. 

when he’s simply himself, even if that’s not what the people he loves want him to be. 

that can be okay, jungkook knows now, because junghyun and yoongi and namjoon have shown him that they’ll still love him anyway. they’ll love him always. 

“we’ll help you however we can, guk. we’ll be right there with you,” namjoon hugs him tighter, hugs them both tight enough that yoongi starts to complain and jungkook giggles at him, snotty and still teary but happy now. settled. 

sure. 

bright, now that he can let the light of this shine on the part of himself that he had until now, kept in shadows. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

“hey hyung, do you know where jin-hyung is?” jungkook asks when namjoon is tucking him into bed. if this had been a week ago or a month ago or a year ago jungkook would probably have asked namjoon to stay with him but he’s okay now. he’s good, even if he’s alone. alone doesn’t have to mean lonely. 

“he’s staying with a friend, i think,” namjoon tells him and he says it like he’s not happy about it. 

“is he okay? he’s okay, right?” jungkook has to ask. he freaked the fuck out today and seokjin being so cold to him only made something much bigger and much deeper that much worse, but seokjin hadn’t caused this and seokjin hadn’t seemed like he was having a great day himself. 

“he’s figuring some things out too, i think,” namjoon says, sitting down next to jungkook and looking down at his hands in his lap, frowning softly. “we were in my studio earlier and he heard that song you’re working on? and that. that seemed to upset him? but i don’t know why, he wouldn’t tell me why.” 

“did you tell him what it was about?” nothing namjoon can say here could be the wrong answer. jungkook hadn’t told namjoon not to show anyone else the song - what was the point, when if it ends up getting released the whole world will hear it, anyway?

“uh. i mean. i couldn’t? because you never really said? but i think it’s -” namjoon shrugs, “it’s pretty obvious to anyone who listens, what it’s about. you’ve got some pretty huge feelings for someone, huh?” namjoon says this like he doesn’t know who that someone is. like every single one of them don’t know and pity jungkook for it. namjoon is such a sweet hyung. so good to jungkook. he’s always looking out for him, thinking ahead to find ways to make things easier for him. 

“why would that make jin hyung mad, though? he knew that. he knows already.” 

“oh he wasn’t mad, bunny. when i said ‘upset’ i meant … sad, i guess. but more than that. it kind of looked like his heart broke, actually. his face was …” namjoon trails off, shaking his head. 

when he’s in the studio, when he’s focused the way he only gets for that part of their work, namjoon is about as observant about people’s feelings as he is good at realizing when people are trying to hit on him. so for him to have noticed that seokjin had an emotional reaction to something, it must have been bad. like, capital letters Bad. 

jungkook has no idea why that song would make seokjin feel that way. he probably figured out it’s about him, because that is immediately, painfully obvious. but he knows jungkook is in love with him? he was the one who sat jungkook down and told him he had to keep his tragic, one-sided feelings under wraps so he didn’t accidentally hurt someone else the way he’d hurt hoseok. 

maybe jungkook should ask him what’s going on with him. 

honestly, so much has happened between them and so much has changed for jungkook because of them that another brutally honest conversation is probably long overdue between the two of them. 

as soon as seokjin gets home, jungkook is going to try to talk to him. 

there’s probably a few things they could both do with clearing up and jungkook for once, isn’t terrified of the prospect of further clarity. 

he knows what they are to one another, even if he can’t yet know exactly how that works. seokjin can’t give him all of those answers right now either and they’re both going to have to figure some of that out together as they go. 

there are no absolutes to be had, for either of them. not right off the bat. not for their forever together. because if get to have that, they’re going to have to work for it. they both have to want it and know how to say that. they’ll have to be brave enough to try. 

but honesty never hurts, not here in this place they’ve all created to love each other this way. to love each other like this. 

jungkook forgot, for a moment, for a day, for a while, that everything is different here because everything here is for them and of them and they - _they_ \- are not like other people, they never have been and were never meant to be, never wanted to be or could be. what works and doesn’t work for others isn’t the same for them. nothing about what and who and how and why they are is that way for people who aren’t them. they are different. 

and they need to talk. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

but what if … 

what if they don’t get the chance to? 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/


	7. whatever you got - i'm down to take it all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “hyung -” jungkook starts, hoping that the right combination of sounds - the magic fucking words - just fall out of him because if they don’t he might fall apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for a sex act undertaken when one party is emotionally compromised, arguably both. neither isn't in a position to consent but they're overwrought and make a decision that they probably should have thought about first so tread carefully if that's an issue for you. the sex scene also involves some minor degradation in the form of name calling and general meanness. message me if you'd like more information, either here or on twitter @hwifighting

when jungkook wakes up the next morning, seokjin is there. 

he’s sitting on the side of the bed, exactly where namjoon was when jungkook fell asleep last night but he has his head in his hands. 

and he’s shaking. 

he’s … laughing. 

“hyung?” jungkook asks, still half asleep and uncertain but instantly concerned, nonetheless. 

“hyung are you okay?” 

seokjin turns to look at him and jungkook’s heart sinks. seokjin’s hair is hanging down into his face, flat the way he lets it get when he wants to pull his hood up but can’t, the way he wears it when he doesn’t want anyone to be able to read something in his eyes that he isn’t ready to say out loud yet. his eyes are red-lined, like maybe he was crying or maybe he just didn’t get any sleep or maybe he’s about to cry. he looks wrecked. 

“why are you laughing?” jungkook has to ask, because what he’s seeing doesn’t make sense, he needs seokjin to tell him what’s going on. 

“oh jungkook, you’re going to find this hilarious. you’re going to find this absolutely hysterical.” his voice sounds shattered and the way he says it just makes jungkook frightened, instead. 

“so i needed to not be here last night, right? because i was having like …. an emotional breakdown, but that’s besides the point.” seokjin reels this all off like it’s nothing. jungkook sits up, tries to interrupt, starts to say something, but seokjin just keeps going. “so where can i go, i wonder? i could go home, but no. i’m an adult. i don’t need to go running home to my parents every time the world ends, that’s ridiculous. plus i’ve already done that and it’s just too soon to need to do it again. i’ve got lots of friends, i could go to one of their places. but half of my friends are famous and they’re just as busy as we are, so none of them are at home. that’s fine. i have non-famous friends. there’s minjae, right?” 

something goes cold in jungkook. something goes so instantly so very cold in jungkook that he burns with it. 

“so i call minjae and ask if i can come over and he says ‘sure’, because minjae is a good friend. minjae has kind of been my best friend, lately.” 

jungkook tries to interrupt again, but seokjin shushes him. actually shushes him. 

“don’t interrupt, jungkook, hyung is speaking. you’ll find this funny, don’t worry.” 

jungkook doesn’t find any of this funny. jungkook is pretty sure that if this story progresses anywhere close to any one of the many terrible conclusions jungkook is already foreseeing, he’s going to have to kill someone. 

“so i go to minjae’s place and it’s nice. it’s so nice to not be here, to not have to talk or not talk about all of this, to just talk about other things with other people for a change. and then - get this, jungkook - and then minjae kisses me.” 

it’s unreal, it is astonishing, jungkook finds, just how quickly he can find himself on the verge of vomiting when a second ago he was fine. when a second ago, he was peacefully asleep in a world where his jin-hyung was coming home to him and hadn’t kissed someone else. 

seokjin is laughing. and jungkook is so, so close to tears that the shame of it makes him want to cry even more. 

“and that’s fine. weird, i guess, but ultimately whatever. i could be into that, i think. that could honestly be the best thing for me, all things considered, but - and this is the hilarious part, jungkook, so pay attention -” 

jungkook is sitting up now. he’s got the bed sheets between him and seokjin fisted in his hands because something inside of him is screaming and jungkook feels like he needs to punch something. he feels like he could punch some _one_ and he’s never felt that way before. jungkook is terrified and that makes him savage because he needs to know that someone else could hurt as much as he is so very much so that he could cause that, he thinks, he could hurt someone that much right now. he almost feels like he needs to. 

“minjae kisses me,” seokjin repeats and jungkook makes a noise low in his throat, “and then he says he’s sorry and asks if you’re going to be okay with that. you, jungkook.” 

this time when seokjin starts laughing, it’s closer to a sobbing sound and jungkook doesn’t know how that makes him feel both better and worse, but it does. 

“he thought we were together, jungkook,” seokjin says, still laughing, still heaving these broken and brittle little sounds out from between his teeth that settle between them like blood on their sheets. “and then he asked if we’d be down for a threesome.” 

seokjin’s attempts at laughter get hysterical, at that. jungkook can’t actually tell if he’s laughing or crying or both or neither and his whole body is rocking with it and jungkook feels frozen in place, held captive by everything in him going molten and burning and wild all at once. 

he hates that minjae kissed seokjin. he hates that anyone who isn’t him got to touch seokjin. he hates himself for feeling so fucking victorious about the fact that it was him that got in the way of seokjin and minjae going any further. he despises himself for being glad that seokjin is back here, with him, even if it means he showed up like this. 

he’s surprised to find that there was something left in him to break anew at the shame he feels for what he wants to do, now. 

“do you want to do that, hyung?” he wants to throw up at just the thought of it, but he’ll do it and that’s what makes the idea of it so terrible. he knows he’ll go through with it if it’s the only way he’ll ever get to touch seokjin. oh, jungkook hates himself. “if you want to, i will. i don’t mind, we can.” 

jungkook doesn’t know what seokjin was expecting him to say. he doesn’t know what he was supposed to say here but he’s also trying to break himself of the habit of feeling like he has to figure out what’s expected from him and offer only that up, so he’s not sorry for what he said. 

he doesn’t know why seokjin is looking at him like jungkook just slapped him, though. 

“you don’t mind?” seokjin asks, his voice so quiet now compared to how it just was, strangled again the way it gets sometimes when jungkook can’t figure out what he’s feeling and doesn’t know how to ask. “you don’t mind having a threesome with me and one of our dancers.” 

he says it flatly. like whatever was just fuelling his hysteria has left him completely. left him devoid of anything at all, maybe. 

and then he sighs, this bone deep, endless thing that turns into something that could have been a laugh once upon a time, maybe, but got twisted up along the way and gnarled and is so somehow vicious now that it makes jungkook gasp. 

“just how fucking desperate for dick are you, jungkook?” seokjin asks and there is no warmth in his eyes, nothing but a hard, frigid sheen of something jungkook’s never seen before when seokjin looks at him. 

jungkook’s blood runs hot and then cold and then, to his shame, hot again. 

“is that seriously all you think about? all that matters to you?” seokjin demands and he’s turning fully around to face jungkook on the bed, his shoulders back and his chest open after being twisted away from jungkook this entire time and jungkook isn’t proud of it but he also can’t stop it when heat starts to pool in his lap. he’s gripping the sheets for an entirely different reason now and seokjin knows it, seokjin is looking down at the crotch of jungkook's pants and the expression on his face becomes a grim kind of smile. 

jungkook’s kind of lost still and probably his brain hasn’t fully come online after only waking up a minute ago and everything that’s happened since, but jungkook still tries to shrug because he doesn’t know what the fuck to say to that. because no, dick isn’t all that matters to him but it is pretty fucking important when the dick in question is seokjin’s because junkook is in love with him and that makes him reckless, that makes him desperate. and seokjin can clearly see that, now. 

the moment hangs between them. a precipice between what hasn’t yet been said and what could happen next. 

and jungkook doesn’t know how to make everything okay, he doesn’t know why seokjin is so upset or how to make it better, but he knows how to make seokjin feel good and he knows he’ll do whatever it takes to get to. he’ll do anything at all if it means he gets to touch seokjin. it’s selfish but as long as it doesn’t hurt seokjin it’s okay, right? he can have this. 

“hyung -” he starts, hoping that the right combination of sounds - the magic fucking words - just fall out of him because if they don’t he might fall apart, but seokjin doesn’t let him finish. 

“you know what - fine. fucking _fine_ ,” he growls and then his hand is in jungkook’s hair and jungkook opens his mouth to say something but he finds that he can’t, because his face is pressed to seokjin’s clothed cock and seokjin is holding him there, holding him down. 

“take it, if this is all you want,” he says and jungkook’s mind goes blank. his mouth waters. he couldn’t keep his tongue in his mouth if his life depended on it and when he gets held - seokjin’s hands on the back of his head and on the back of his neck now - with his open mouth wet and panting over seokjin’s cock, jumping for jungkook’s tongue beneath the fabric of his pants, jungkook moans. 

"please hyung, please can i -" 

( 'can i have you?' is what jungkook wants to say, but he already knows the answer to that question. so 'can i have this' will have to do, instead. ) 

“you’re fucking unbelievable,” seokjin says, laughing again and breathless with it and then the hand on jungkook’s head is knotting in his hair and tugging jungkook’s head out of his lap and jungkook doesn’t want that, that isn’t what - 

“no, hyung,” jungkook says, straining against seokjin’s hand so tight in his hair and it hurts and that just makes it better, “please. let me. please, i want -” 

“i know what you want,” seokjin says and it’s sharp and it stings and that’s good too, “i know this is what you want,” seokjin starts to push his pants down off his hips with his free hand and then he’s pulling at jungkook’s hair, tugging him to the side of the bed and not stopping, just pulling and pulling some more until jungkook is falling off the bed and not even pausing then, just pulling still, “so get on your knees for it like the fucking slut that you are, hm?” 

and that feels like being slapped but only in a way that makes jungkook’s belly knot up tightly and he wonders if seokjin would actually slap him, because he didn’t think seokjin would but maybe he will, because jungkook didn’t exactly see this coming and here they are. he wants to say ‘thank you’ or maybe ask what the fuck is going on, but he’s on his knees on their bedroom carpet and seokjin is sitting on their bed with his pants down, pulling jungkook’s head down with both hands now and jungkook stops letting his mind race, lets his heartbeat take over instead. jungkook gives in. 

“hyungghh,” he whimpers, a last ditch effort to say something, say fucking anything before he’s going with the hold seokjin has on him, letting him tug jungkook’s open mouth down over his cock. and then he’s lost. jungkook is gone. 

seokjin’s dick is big in his mouth and he’s not even fully hard yet. jungkook can feel him pulse, hot on his tongue, feels more and more like he can’t breathe, like he might choke and he closes his eyes so he can enjoy every nano second of it. 

it’s been a while since jungkook did this, a long time really, but jungkook would remember if it ever felt like this before and it didn’t, it never has. 

"more, hyung. deeper, please," jungkook wants, wants so badly it could pull him apart and if this is all he'll ever get to have, he wants it all. 

he drops his head, tongue lifted and wrapped wet around the shaft of seokjin’s cock and his mouth is so full of spit that it’s getting everywhere but jungkook doesn’t care and seokjin mustn’t either because when he gets jungkook’s nose pressed into the hot skin of his belly he groans like this is the best thing that’s ever happened to him. 

he laughs and it still doesn’t sound right but jungkook can’t stop, can’t care. 

“of course your greedy little mouth would be this good,” seokjin says and he’s got his head tilted back to the ceiling, his knees are spread wide for jungkook to fit between his legs and jungkook swallows hard around seokjin’s dick because if he doesn’t he’s going to do something really embarrassing like start sobbing out of sheer gratitude, pure and utter fucking relief. “of course you look this fucking good when you have to shut the fuck up to suck my cock. such a pretty little slut when you get what you want, huh?” 

it’s a lot, for a second, trying to remember to keep his teeth in check, not choking on his own spit, calming his gag reflex but seokjin is looking down at him, locks eyes with him at last and jungkook forgets about anything he ever learned with anyone else because this is seokjin and that makes it easy. he puts his hands on seokjin’s thighs and chokes himself on seokjin’s cock until seokjin has to push him off. 

“you need to breathe, you idiot,” seokjin says and it’s not kind or fond. he stands up and jungkook just stares up at him, sits back on his heels and waits. looks up at seokjin standing in front of him with his cock shining wet with jungkook’s spit in his hand and _wants_. 

“you love this, don’t you?” seokjin asks, stepping back in and jungkook tilts his head without even thinking about it, lifts his chin and lets seokjin push his dick back into his mouth, fucking shallowly until jungkook makes some kind of noise, an audible protest. 

“you want it deep, guk?” seokjin taunts and jungkook’s eyes sting and he’s nodding frantically, starts to say ‘yes’, only it comes out as “yeuuungh” instead because then seokjin has his fingers pressed to jungkook’s jaw and his cock shoved so far down jungkook’s throat that the only sounds jungkook can make now are the disgusting, wet ‘glug’ ‘glug’ noises that seokjin’s cock force out of him when jungkook’s throat works around it, his gag reflex quivering uselessly because seokjin just keeps fucking past it. jungkook’s dick jumps with every pathetic, filthy slurp his mouth gives up around seokjin’s cock. he loves, he fucking loves how full his mouth is, but he hates it too because even pressed as close to seokjin as he can get, he can only barely get at his balls with his tongue dipping out of his mouth, drool dripping onto them when what he wants is to be able to suck on them, too. 

he doesn’t mean to, doesn’t even see it coming, but jungkook comes first, completely untouched in his shorts. he’d apologize, or he will, but seokjin just looks down at him, on his knees on the floor, wet in his own boxers just from sucking seokjin’s cock and laughs. 

“that’s what gets you off, huh? getting your face fucked first thing in the morning by your hyung? why am i not surprised, jungkook?” 

seokjin has both his hands on the sides of jungkook’s head now, his fingers a big cradle for jungkook to tip back into as seokjin fucks his throat and jungkook is still choking some, but that just seems to make seokjin go faster, grip him harder. he bows forward over jungkook, so tall and looming over him with one hand falling to jungkook’s shoulder to hold himself up when he pushes his cock in deep and comes. he pulls back as he does so he can flood jungkook’s mouth with his come, get it dripping down over his lips and then push back in just to hear jungkook choke again when he tries to swallow around seokjin’s come, his own spit and the head of seokjin’s cock all at the same time. 

“look at the mess you’ve made,” seokjin says and when he pulls his spit and come sticky cock out of jungkook’s mouth and shows it to him, jungkook sits up a little higher on his knees and tries to lean back in, sticks out his tongue and hopes. 

“ah, ah,” seokjin admonishes, grabbing a fistful of jungkook’s hair and holding him back. “stay still. be a good slut for me.” 

and jungkook does stay still, but it doesn’t matter because seokjin holds him that way anyway, no give in the hold he has on jungkook’s hair at all as he wipes his cock clean on jungkook’s face, covering his cheeks and his jaw and his chin with spit and come until it’s dripping off him, dripping down his neck, falling onto his clothes and probably making a mess of the floor too but jungkook can’t check because he can’t take his eyes off seokjin. seokjin doesn’t look back at him, just stares transfixed at the mess he’s making. but he’s transfixed and that’s for jungkook and jungkook’s shoulders lift a little, his chest feels bigger, huge. 

when he’s done, seokjin gathers the mess on his fingers and pushes it into jungkook’s mouth. he lets jungkook suck on his fingers a little and he even starts to smile at that, but then - 

then he stops. he freezes in place, almost and he finally, finally lifts his eyes to jungkook’s after what feels like hours, feels like forever and they look at each other for a split second and then seokjin’s face just caves in on itself, crumples like a bomb went off in him. 

he steps back and sits down on the bed, heavy like his strings have been cut and he looks at jungkook and then he starts to cry. 

“jungkook. jungkook what did i just do?” 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 

seokjin won’t stop crying. 

he’s sitting in their bed with his knees pulled up, his arms crossed over them and his head down low. 

he looks so small. 

he looks so small and he won’t stop crying. he won’t talk to jungkook. 

jungkook doesn’t know what to do. 

he goes to the bathroom and grabs a washcloth, cleans off his face and tries not to throw up in the sink and then tries not to cry when seokjin won’t let him get close enough to him to clean him up, to touch him, to help him somehow, to make this better however he can. 

jungkook sits at the very end of their bed and hasn’t got a clue what he’s supposed to do. 

they sit like this, seokjin sobbing and jungkook trying to stave off a panic attack for what feels like hours but jungkook can’t leave, doesn’t think he could walk away from seokjin when he’s like this even if seokjin asked him to but he doesn’t and so he stays and he stays quiet and he panics and he panics. 

days, years later, seokjin lifts his head and looks at jungkook. 

his face is red and blotchy, half covered in snot and streaked in tears and he’s still beautiful and jungkook’s heart just seizes up in him, dies, a little bit. he wonders what seokjin thought he looked like, just a few minutes ago, when jungkook was just as much of a mess as seokjin is now, but it was because seokjin had just fucked jungkook’s mouth and then covered his face with his come. he wonders if seokjin thought he looked beautiful, even then. he wonders if seokjin has ever looked at jungkook and thought he was beautiful. 

“this,” seokjin says and his voice is wrecked and so is jungkook’s whole world, “this isn’t about you.” 

which. the love of jungkook’s life, his best friend, his favourite person is sitting in their bed sobbing himself hoarse because of something jungkook did. how could this not be about him? 

“this is about me, jungkook,” seokjin insists and sure, it’s definitely about seokjin but it has to be about jungkook too. this has to be about them. 

“i shouldn’t have done that. i shouldn’t have made you … do that,” seokjin says, wringing his hands and jungkook is still so lost, but - 

“you didn’t make me do anything hyung. i wanted to. i always want to -” 

“yes, i know!” seokjin’s voice spikes, sharp and he’s biting at his own lips and sniffing hard and trying so hard to pull himself together and jungkook just doesn’t understand. “i know that you just want to get fucked and that’s fine, i love you and i support your choices,” which, that’s nice and all but jungkook still feels kind of judged. or misjudged, maybe. something about this isn’t sitting exactly right with him. “but we’ve talked about this, jungkook. i can’t be that person for you and i’m sad about that, too. i wish i could and i think i wished so hard that i made it work for like five minutes, but now i’m broken and i -” he’s kind of hysterical by the time he finishes, shouting the ‘broken’ part and jungkook is still lost but now he’s also maybe offended too? 

“so …” and he’s not proud of this, he’s really not, but jungkook needs clarification. it is a need and not just a want, “so i broke you by sucking your dick? is that what you’re saying, hyung?” 

he just needs to know, is all. he just needs this one little thing cleared up for him before he goes and throws himself off a bridge. 

“no!” seokjin yells and jungkook wonders how hard he’d have to hit his head before he could make himself forget a whole day because nothing good has happened in this one, even though it’s only an hour old and it was for at least half of that time the best day of his life. 

“i let you suck my dick and now i’m broken because i needed to not know what that was like, jungkook!” 

but why? if seokjin wishes he was able to fuck jungkook, why is it a bad thing that he did? how could it possibly have been a mistake if it was what seokjin wanted and it’s always what jungkook wants? 

“why? why, hyung?” 

“because i’m in love with you,” seokjin says, through gritted teeth, through a fresh wave of tears, through his hands; stacked over his mouth like he’s trying to keep the words in. “because i’m in love with you and it would be so easy if i could just be someone that you could fuck whenever you wanted but, but just - just … this won’t ever be enough for me because i want it all, i want every single little bit of you and now i … now i know what it’s like to touch you like this. and now i don’t know what to do.” 

jungkook stares at him. 

he’s crying so hard he can barely get breaths in between his sobs and his whole chest is heaving with it, his shoulders shaking and jungkook can feel the whole bed move with the force of seokjin’s tears. 

and it’s … familiar. 

it’s so painfully, achingly familiar, is the thing. 

it’s basically a rerun of what jungkook did right here in this same bed when seokjin had to go home to get away from him and that’s what makes jungkook understand. 

more than what seokjin says, seeing seokjin like this is what makes jungkook get it. 

because this is what it looks like when a heart breaks. jungkook knows that because jungkook felt this too. 

“hyung,” he says, “seokjin hyung.” 

he gets up, his legs solid beneath him and his thoughts clearing, his mind whirring but sorting, making sense out of so many things that he has misunderstood, so many ways this has gone so terribly, terribly wrong. 

“can i touch you?” he asks when he’s at seokin’s side, when he’s sitting next to him but it’s still not enough. 

seokjin looks at him warily. he looks at him like he’s frightened of him and jungkook hates that, he hates that they let themselves get here, but he can make it better. he can fix this. 

still looking at jungkook like he might bite, or worse; looking at jungkook like he’s already hurt him and could do it again, seokjin still nods. 

the soft, lovely sweep of seokjin’s cheekbones are hot to the touch when jungkook gets his fingers on them, uses his thumbs to wipe away seokjin’s tears. he’s looking up into jungkook’s face like he’s lost but like maybe jungkook can lead him back, like maybe jungkook is the only one who could ever show him the way back home. 

and he’s right. jungkook knows what he has to do to fix this. 

“you’re wrong about what you think this is,” jungkook tells him and seokjin’s eyebrows dip together in the beginnings of a frown, in automatic disagreement, but he keeps looking at jungkook and doesn’t say anything. he’s not crying now. 

“you’re wrong, but i was wrong too, hyung. i think maybe we’re both really bad at this,” and jesus fuck if that isn’t the understatement of the century. 

“we might stay bad at it though, if we don’t ask for help. i want to ask the other hyungs for help, jin-hyung. is that okay if i go do that?” 

this is too big for jungkook. this is huge and they’re just the two of them. and maybe, yes, it is the two of them in this, but that doesn’t make it any smaller or any easier. kind of the exact opposite, actually. 

“that … that sounds okay,” seokjin says, still sounding and looking uncertain but looking at jungkook. looking at him like he trusts him. “can i come too? i think i might need some help too.” 

“of course, hyung,” jungkook tells him and he smiles at seokjin and tries to tell him that way that everything is going to be okay because he doesn’t know how to say that with words yet but that’s okay too because they’re not in this alone. that’s the part they got the most wrong, jungkook thinks. that’s why they got it so wrong in the first place. 

“c’mon,” he says, holding his hand out to seokjin and maybe it’s too soon for that but maybe it’s not because seokjin takes it and clings to it. 

jungkook leads him out of their room, leads him through the whole apartment, knocking on doors and collecting hyungs who take one look at jungkook standing in the hallway with seokjin behind him, seokjin at his shoulder still blotchy faced and clinging to him and then fall in line without a word. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

no one says anything, no one questions any of what’s happening until they’re all assembled in the living room, looking like the avengers might if they were all confused puny humans still half asleep and gathered together for the weirdest, saddest christmas morning ever. 

they’re all in their sleep clothes and jimin had to pull on one of taehyung’s hoodies because he hadn’t been wearing anything at all when jungkook had knocked on their door. 

the strangest part is seokjin, who instead of completing the vaguely circular spread they’d automatically formed around the room, chose to not let go of jungkook’s hand and sat curled up behind him, instead, cross-legged and still clinging to him, his chest pressed up against jungkook’s back and his head on jungkook’s shoulder. that’s the strangest part and jungkook’s favourite part for sure. 

“did you two finally fuck? is that what’s happening here? because i definitely thought jungkook would be the one that cried,” and trust taehyung to just bulldoze straight into the middle of what’s clearly a very sensitive situation. 

jungkook doesn’t know if it says more about him or taehyung that he finds it pretty helpful, all things considered. 

“that’s … actually a good place to start,” he says, resisting the sudden urge to close his eyes in defeat because how is this his life? how is this their lives? 

“okay. so, yes, seokjin hyung and i did … get … intimate.” he can’t talk about in coarse terms anymore, even if it did make seokjin cry, even if they did go about it in a completely backwards way that could have and maybe still could fuck everything up for them. but jungkook won’t go down without a fight. pun … not intended. his lizard brain remains his worst enemy, even now. 

“do any of you think you know why that would have happened?” 

there are probably a hundred different answers that could be given in response to that question. there’s probably a hundred questions that beg to be asked before any answers are forthcoming at all. for example: “what the fuck are you talking about?”, “why the fuck are we here?” and “what the fuck is going on?” to name but a few. 

so it’s both ridiculous and wonderful that what happens is this: 

“because you’re in love with jin-hyung,” taehyung and jimin say in unison, at the exact same time as rap line in their entirety and probably for the first and only time in their lives in harmony, say; 

“because jin-hyung is in love with you.” 

seokjin sits up, at jungkook’s back. he’d been kind of listless back there, koala hugging jungkook and sighing softly but still acting mostly like a spectator in all of this, until now. 

“no he isn’t,” seokjin says. he looks at jungkook. “no you aren’t.” 

“uh, yes i am,” jungkook says, squeezing seokjin’s hand. 

“he really is, hyung. i think it might have actually driven him out of his tiny mind. he’s literally crazy about you,” only jimin could sound both impressed and disgusted at the same time. 

taehyung nods helpfully. 

“but we didn’t know you were in love with him. when did that happen?” he asks rap line, instead of seokjin, because sure he’s trying to be helpful but he’s still taehyung. 

“um, forever ago? like at the dawn of time itself? i can’t remember a time when seokjin-hyung wasn’t all the way fucked up because of jungkook. i bet it was peaceful, though. i bet i was happy,” yoongi says, sounding wistful. jungkook doesn’t remind him that during such a time, if jungkook’s quick maths can be relied on even just this once, yoongi was sharing a single room with eight other people and beginning to learn choreography for the first time. 

“that’s craaaazy,” taehyung says, “i didn’t see that at all. like i knew he was dtf kook like the rest of us, but i didn’t know he had for real feelings.” 

at jungkook’s shoulder, sitting more alongside him than behind him now, seokjin goes still. his head tilts in taehyung’s direction at a strange angle, all slow and birdlike and his eyes almost look like they’re flashing. taehyung yips and dives for cover behind jimin and jungkook kind of feels like maybe he just at long last got his hogwarts letter, except it’s an iron clad, blood contract that makes him seokjin’s in every way he wants to be instead and not even an entirely brand new world of magic could compete with that. 

“i’m jealous,” seokjin announces, like that wasn’t already obvious, like jungkook isn’t vibrating in place because of exactly that, “and also confused. mostly confused, but definitely not above bodily harm if you so much as look at him in a way i don’t like, kim taehyung.” 

“where was this energy when he asked them to fuck him, hmm hyung?” hoseok wants to know. this, jungkook would also like to know. he looks at seokjin. 

“i was pretending i could be okay with jungkook sleeping with other people. it was -” seokjin closes his eyes, takes a breath so big that his chest swells with it and jungkook gets to feel that all along his side. jungkook leans back into him harder, needs to be closer. “it was a dark time but i did try to be the bigger person, let the record show that.” 

that’s dumb. seokjin is always the bigger person. that’s like a major staple of why jungkook is so into him. 

“i was practicing my role as someone who wasn’t going to fall to the ground every time jungkook brought someone home or went out on a date or fucked half of seoul thanks to some infernal fucking hook up app.” 

jungkook’s stomach turns unpleasantly, at that. because he knows what that feels like. 

“i was only ever going to fuck other people for you, hyung. because i love you.” and god, does he. seokjin is sitting here, with him, all over him, so fucking big and warm and blisteringly, achingly gorgeous and he loves him. seokjin loves him. and he loves seokjin. 

jungkook can’t help it, he twists back and presses his lips to seokjin’s still tear damp cheek. “love you, hyung,” he says and it sounds different now that he can say it the way he means it and seokjin must think so too because his eyes get wet again. 

“wait, pause,” hoseok says and jungkook almost forgets what they were talking about, almost startles to hear a voice besides theirs. in the space of like a single second he’s lost in seokjin. gone completely, now that he’s allowed to love him. 

“you could do with explaining that part, maybe. i mean seokjin hyung looks like he’s surprisingly cool with you wanting to fuck other people for him somehow, but i’m not sure i get how you doing that would benefit him. or your apparently epic love. plus the vmin thing? what could you possibly hope to achieve by fucking those hellhounds?” 

“yeah, what the fuck were you doing asking them that?” yoongi demands, “if you’re supposedly in love with seokjin?” 

“first of all, fuck your ‘supposedly’,” jungkook says and maybe yoongi will beat his ass for swearing at him later but jungkook doesn’t give a single shit, “and second of all, i thought literally nobody wanted to fuck me. i threw myself at seokjin hyung like a hundred times and then i threw myself at vmin and i was pretty fucking close to throwing myself at you and namjoon hyung until your weird sex triangle with hobi hyung made me slow my roll, so forgive me for making some bad choices along the way but i was heartbroken and fucked up and i thought maybe nobody would ever want me. can you of all people judge me?” 

yoongi definitely looks murderous now but jungkook can’t bring himself to care, he won’t apologize. he’s not scared. namjoon wouldn’t let yoongi hurt him. 

“okay our relationship isn’t a sex triangle and there’s nothing weird about it. we’re in a loving and committed, healthy polyamorous triad,” honestly only namjoon could say that combination of words and have jungkook still take him seriously. “but i think what yoongi is trying to ask is how we were supposed to know that you were in love with seokjin hyung when all you did was very loudly talk about wanting to fuck him and also sometimes offer to fuck other people that you’re both very close to and then make a whole plan to fuck a lot of total strangers?” 

“yeah,” yoongi says, kind of begrudgingly. he still doesn’t look at all happy. “that is what i was trying to say. if i’m supposed to believe that you were in love with hyung all this time then i’m not so sure you know what it means to love someone. if -” 

“yoongi,” seokjin interrupts, “yoongi you’re talking to jungkook. like. jeon jungkook. remember?” 

seokjin puts his arms around jungkook’s waist, hugs into him and lets his head rest on jungkook’s shoulder. his mouth is like an inch away from being pressed to jungkook’s neck and that does a lot to soothe the anger and sadness and shame that what yoongi’s saying makes rise in him. 

yoongi is someone who means a lot to jungkook. he’s someone jungkook respects an awful lot. 

yoongi is also looking at jungkook like he’s never seen him before. 

he shakes his head. 

“fuck, i’m sorry kook,” he says. and then he scoots across the floor on his butt to come hug jungkook. he pats seokjin wherever he can reach him, as he does. “i was worrying so much about jin-hyung that i forgot that you were … you. that you’re mine. all of ours. i didn’t mean those things, bun. i’ve just spent a lot of time trying to make sure hyung doesn’t get his heart broken and i forgot to think about you and your heart. m’sorry sweetheart.” he holds both of jungkook’s hands in his. 

“i didn’t mean to make you all think i was just some giant slut,” jungkook murmurs, regretful and solemn. “i mean. i am, but only for seokjin hyung. because i love him. and it’s easy to say you wanna bang someone. it’s not so easy to say you’re in love with them and kind of always have been. especially when you think they don’t feel the same way. i thought -” ugh, words are the worst. saying this shit out loud is the fucking worst but feeling it had been pretty fucking godawful too so jungkook knows that it’s important to address if it, if he’s ever going to get past it. 

“i thought hyung didn’t want me like that. so i thought maybe if i figured out what jin-hyung did want, i could get good at that. like, practice for him. and then be what he wanted. or like … a way for him to get what he wanted, i guess. i never thought he’d want me for real. i just hoped he’d have me anyway.” 

“oh jungkook,” seokjin asks and he’s wrapped so completely around jungkook that jungkook hears and feels it when he speaks. he shivers and seokjin tightens his arms around him. “but why did you think that? like how could you possibly not know how i felt about you?” 

jungkook puts his hands on top of seokjin’s, where they’re crossed around jungkook’s middle. and seokjin lets him. it’s awesome. 

“i knew you loved me, but i thought maybe …” it’s embarrassing to say, with the horrific gift of hindsight, but he must, “i kind of thought you just indulged me? spoiled me and stuff. i couldn’t figure out if it was because you were into me or because you just took it upon yourself to take care of me. i started to think that might be the way it was for all of you, actually. made me wonder if i was just another job to you all.” 

“oh babe,” jimin murmurs and they all look at jungkook like he’s crazy but also someone very, very precious to them. 

“you’re not like … something to manage, guk. you’re - ours, just like yoongi hyung said.” jungkook has heard a variation on that from most of them by now, but hearing that from hoseok helps, even though jungkook doesn’t need it. not anymore. 

“i know. i figured it out in the end. i figured out a lot of stuff, by myself. i still got this completely wrong though,” he says, tilting his head back to rest alongside seokjin’s. he holds his breath when seokjin starts to drag his nose up along the side of jungkook’s neck. he maybe dies a little bit when seokjin’s mouth follows that same path. or maybe all the versions of jungkook that thought seokjin would never love him do. 

“we both got it wrong, baby,” seokjin says and something in jungkook blooms to life. it is hope. 

“okay so before you two start fucking right here, is there anything else that needs to be cleared up? anyone else got anything to contribute?” it’s pretty often pretty difficult for jungkook to tell for sure when yoongi is being sarcastic and when he isn’t. he’s had to get like practiced at it, so he’s kind of amazed to find that he’s able to tell that yoongi is being completely sincere in asking that question. it is pretty on brand for him to exploit any scenario where they’re forced to talk about their feelings, though, jungkook supposes. 

plus like, yoongi is right. they got so much of this so, so wrong. clarification isn’t just important now, it’s going to be of paramount importance from here on out. 

jungkook’s gonna talk about his feelings so fucking much. 

but like, speaking of. 

“hyung, why did you tell me i wasn’t allowed to be in love with you, though?” jungkook has to ask, because okay it seems like they’re very much on the same page now and that’s something jungkook had given up on hoping he’d get to have. but he gave up on it for a reason. “remember? when i almost broke hobi hyung? and you called me ‘sweetheart’ and said i couldn’t do that, that i couldn’t be in love with you if it was starting to effect other people.” 

“damn, jin-hyung. you were willing to walk away from love for me? i’m honored,” hoseok says and jungkook rolls his eyes, still waiting for an answer. 

seokjin’s face is one big twist of confusion, when jungkook looks at him. 

“that is … not how that conversation went, in my mind,” he says, frowning and clearly thinking hard. it kind of looks like it hurts. “i thought i told you that you had to be careful about being as rough with these beanie babies as i let you be with me.” 

“ooh, kinky, i approve,” taehyung interjects and jimin leans over to bite him on the ball of his shoulder. probably not the best course of action, if the way taehyung goes completely still and brings both of his hands quickly into his lap is any indication. again, jungkook rolls his eyes. 

“but hyung, you said that i ‘felt a certain way’ about you. i thought you meant you knew i was in love with you. what did you mean, if that wasn’t it?” 

“oh. i just meant that you wanted to bone me. because that, you had made pretty clear. as has been mentioned, that’s actually the only thing you did make clear.” 

jungkook pouts at that. like, he knows he’s not now nor has he ever been particularly quiet about his perma-thirst for seokjin. but what kind of hyungs can’t read between the fucking liines? he’s jeon jungkook and he’s got layers. yes he wants to fuck seokjin stupid and he has never felt the need or desire to hide that, but he’s also always for every single moment of his life since he met him wanted to hold his hand and put his hair in little space buns and take baths with him and make them matching bracelets that have each other’s names beaded into them. how can anyone claim to not have been able to see all of that? the fucking space station is going to land back on earth one day with a bunch of super embarrassing reports about how this one kid in seoul couldn’t keep his glaringly obvious love for that other big kid he was always hanging off from shining so goddamn bright that it registered with their system as a fucking solar flare. 

“but what about all the cute memes and stuff i always text you?” jungkook demands, feeling defensive now. 

“do you mean the ones about fisting? or the ones where amateur porn stars who look a teeny little bit like me do a bunch of incredibly hardcore sex acts with amateur porn stars who look uncomfortably like you?” seokjin is smiling now, just a little bit and that’s enough to make jungkook smile back on pure instinct, but no, this is no time for smiling, there are points to be made. which … 

“okay, fair. however, you clearly watched them, so i wasn’t entirely barking up the wrong tree.” that needs to be acknowledged, jungkook feels. 

“you weren’t barking up the wrong tree at all. hyung wanted to do all that fucked up shit to you, you dummy. he just also wanted to put a ring on your chaotic gay ass, apparently. i can’t say i saw that, but i was pretty busy trying to stop taehyung from fucking you and trying to stop you from fucking anyone who wasn’t hyung,” jimin is aiming for helpful, trying his best to cut through the nonsense and get them one step closer to the happy ending he’s always wanted for them, jungkook is sure. but - 

“a ring on my ass, you say. like a butt plug? can you get butt plugs with rings on them? because that would be -” jungkook can actually feel his own eyes get bigger. this is like, so much to think about, this is - 

“aaaaand now can you see why we all had the opinion of you that we did?” namjoon asks. “we didn’t think you would hurt hyung or that you wouldn’t care about his feelings, but you do get kind of fixated on the physical side of things. or you do when you talk to us, at least, i don’t know what it’s like in your head. or when you talk to our fellow maknae hellions.” 

ugh, jungkook loves it when namjoon willingly refers to himself as a member of maknae line, even more than when namjoon accidentally lumps himself in with their collective demonic energy. but jungkook can’t ignore that as usual, namjoon has made points, too. 

“that’s fair, i guess,” he can admit. he is still thinking about seokjin lubing him up so he can put a butt plug topped with a diamond ring in his ass, if he’s completely honest with himself. and in continuing that thread of brutal honesty, jungkook is not ashamed of that. 

“i can admit that i have been pretty vocal about wanting to get sexually devastated by hyung,” he says, being the second biggest man, because he’s big and trying to be bigger all the time but seokjin will always be bigger still and that’s exactly how jungkook likes it. “but in my defense, i did have to go through puberty right next to him, so.” that says everything that needs to be said, really. 

“that is also a good point. and probably a pretty solid blanket explanation for most of jungkook’s personality, when you really think about it,” hoseok says, looking seokjin up and down in a way that was maybe meant to be simply vaguely cataloging, but doesn’t quite hit the mark in jungkook’s opinion. 

“hyung i didn’t want to hurt you the first time, please don’t make me do it again. you know what i’m like, sometimes i can’t stop myself.” that’s not exactly true. jungkook has learned a lot about self control lately. more than he’d have liked, really. but it doesn’t hurt to have hoseok not know the extent of that yet. it doesn’t hurt at all when hoseok says ‘oop’ quickly and quietly and looks down at the floor, scooting surreptitiously closer to yoongi. 

“you seriously can’t threaten people just for looking at me,” seokjin says, even though he just did the exact same thing to taehyung not even five minutes ago. even though his cheeks are pinked up and he’s looking at jungkook like maybe jungkook can and should do just that. 

“i don’t have a problem with people looking at you. but they’re looking at parts of you that i haven’t gotten to touch like they want to, like they could. that’s the part i don’t like.” jungkook is being an unrepentant brat now, twisting in seokjin’s hold so he can loop an arm around his waist, let his hand slip low, low, low on seokjin’s back, leaning in to talk into seokjin’s ear. “it probably won’t be an issue once i’ve touched you everywhere? if you would be so obliging, hyung.” 

a shudder rips through seokjin’s whole body, making him jolt in jungkook’s arms. 

“yeaaah they’re def like four seconds away from mounting each other right in front of us, time for a strategic retreat, troops,” hoseok says, standing up and reaching for namjoon’s hand to pull him up too. yoongi paws at namjoon’s leg until they both haul him up off the floor too. “it’s been an honour, gents, but next time we have to to do this i have a couple suggestions. like, let’s do it at a reasonable hour. or better yet - let’s just not. at all.” 

“do we have to leave, minnie?” taehyung is pouting and jungkook only knows that because he can hear it. he hasn’t looked away from seokjin yet. he might not ever again, honestly. he can’t remember a single other sight that he’s ever found as compelling as seokjin smiling at him from up close, his unfairly plush mouth so full and fond and right there for jungkook to look at forever. 

jimin accidentally almost stands on jungkook as he’s dragging taehyung away but it’s fine because it just means jungkook has to move back out of his way and that means moving back into seokjin’s space some more. 

“can i remind you,” jimin is saying as they disappear down the hall, “that i also want to fuck him? i really don’t appreciate how i’ve had to be the responsible one here, do you know how hard that is when he’s literally lying in our laps _asking_ us to fuck him? you put me in such an uncomfortable situation, taehyung, like you know i’m not happy …” 

jungkook laughs a little, mostly at the sheer absurdity of it all, but he stops laughing when seokjin drags him forward by the front of his shirt and buries his face in against jungkook’s throat. he’s so warm, so close and jungkook feels molten with it, wants to burst for getting to touch him, now. 

“i know that you’re a fucking handful and i happen to really like you that way, but the three of you have a weird sexy hive mind energy that i don’t really understand and i don’t like it, jungkook. if you -” 

“i’m not into them. not like i’m into you,” jungkook says, turning his face into seokjin’s hair and just breathing him in, just revelling in having him this close and knowing what it means, now. knowing that they both know what it means and what they are to one another, at last. 

“i can’t guarantee you any serious degree of privacy from them, though,” he has to add, because, “one time i got a phantom hickey on my neck after the two of them spent all night mauling each other and i think i might get sympathetic boners because of them, too, but i’ve never really been able to figure it out for sure because you’re usually somewhere around and that’s never exactly not a cause to get hard, you know?” 

“no,” seokjin says, his mouth moving against jungkook’s throat. the hot sensation of it makes jungkook have to swallow, which in turn makes seokjin have to lick at his adam’s apple, apparently. “i don’t know, but i’m probably going to find out, huh?” 

“oh, hyung,” jungkook sighs, letting his weight rest back on his hands, tilting his head helpfully so seokjin can get at his neck better, “let me go grab us some energy drinks from the fridge and then i’ll tell you all about it.” 

seokjin laughs, his lips humming with it against jungkook’s skin and jungkook closes his eyes and lets himself, 

finally, 

fall. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/


	8. if it makes me your king

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “is ‘workplace incident’ what you’re calling seokjin-hyung’s dick now? because i have to give you points for creativity. you’re definitely not going to call it the wrong name by accident,” taehyung sounds both completely serious and like he’s speaking from experience. jungkook despairs of him.

they tumble into bed, a two part person. 

jungkook goes first, seokjin right behind him with his hands on jungkook’s waist. jungkook’s shirt rides up to reveal his skin and seokjin touches him there too, not pausing or stuttering or pretending not to notice or trying to pretend he doesn’t want to put his hands to jungkook’s bared skin. 

in the early morning light that’s slitting in through the gap in their curtains, they fold together in the middle of their bed, jungkook curled up small and seokjin curved around him, clutching him close. 

“i love you, hyung,” jungkook says, bringing seokjin’s hand to his mouth and kissing all of his knuckles, unfurling his fingers to press a kiss to his palm. he can’t wait until the day when there’s not a single centimeter of seokjin’s skin that his mouth doesn’t know. he can wait, though, now that he knows that day is coming. 

“‘m so in love with you, hyung,” jungkook says, the words a little bit garbled, tumbling out of him in fits and starts because they’ve lived inside of him for so long that the light, the day, the feel of seokjin’s skin against his and the warm scent of him folded around jungkook is so new, unknown and heady, unfamiliar and exhilarating. 

seokjin hums softly, his cheek hot at the back of jungkook’s neck, his arms closing around jungkook to still his trembles. 

“i’ve loved you since i first saw you,” seokjin says, his voice so quiet that jungkook has to close his eyes, blinks back tears, “it changed along the way but it was always there. every single day. i wanted to protect you, wanted to keep you safe. and then i wanted to tell you that you make me feel safe. i wanted and wanted and wanted you. it kept being more, getting bigger and then one day there just wasn’t any ways that i didn’t want you left. and that meant i needed you, i think. scared me so much, guk,” he says and jungkook doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move a muscle, just lies still and breathes, his chest rising and falling with it in seokjin’s arms. “it still scares me. it’s so much. but it’s a part of me and i can’t get away from it. i don’t want to.” 

it makes jungkook think of how he’d felt trying to stitch together the bits and pieces of the song that’s made up of the sounds he’d used to describe what this is like, for him. it had hurt so much, hearing it. feeling it. but it only hurt so much because it was like holding a mirror up to a part of him that was broken and bruised and bleeding but would always be there. was always going to be a part of who he was because he wouldn’t be him, without it. 

“i still don’t think i can do it. don’t think i could ever survive it,” seokjin says, “but you can. you’re strong enough. you can do it.” 

he brings a hand to jungkook’s chin, presses his fingertips low to the line of jungkook’s jaw and lifts jungkook’s face so he can lean up on his elbow and look down into jungkook’s eyes.

“you can carry this for me and i’ll carry how you feel about me. and then we’ll both be okay. i think that’s the only way we’ll ever be okay,” he says and he doesn’t sound uncertain, but he looks it. he looks like the weight of what he’s saying - the burden of holding onto what he’s feeling - is seconds away from caving him in completely. 

and it’s the easiest thing in the world for jungkook to put his hand on his neck and draw him down until their mouths meet, lips pressed together and then parting just to come back together again. it’s the closest jungkook has ever been to seokjin. there’s no space between them at all anymore and then jungkook’s bottom lip is tugged in between seokjin’s teeth and then seokjin’s tongue is soft and sweet in jungkook’s mouth and they are a two part person, overlapping until they are one. 

“i’ve got you, hyung,” jungkook says, low and huge and a whisper that seokjin kisses off his lips. 

“i love you, too,” seokjin says, in answer. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 

lots of things change, but jungkook is just as fond, he finds, of the things that stay the same. 

today, they had a hellish round of schedules that’s entirely familiar to them, both individually and as a seemingly never ending loop of hoops they need to jump through. 

today, there were a bunch of moments when jungkook had to be careful about how and where and why he touched seokjin. there had also been moments when he hadn’t had to care about any of that. and either way - both ways - it’s okay, because jungkook is a master negotiator now. weeks spent wrangling his own desires inside, outside and alongside their careers, their friendships and jungkook’s hopes for his forever have made him something of a prodigy. 

“i am like if a king and a god had a baby who was also a very powerful witch,” he decides. 

“you’re humble too,” namjoon observes mildly from over the top of his book, which he’s reading over the top of his glasses. the vision that he is is a whole lot and still, jungkook remains strong. 

“hyungs,” jungkook announces, “hyungs - friends and foes alike -” 

(“heyyy,” hoseok interjects, “i said i was sorry. how was i supposed to know ‘doing laundry’ meant you were going to be trying to feel jin-hyung up on the washing machine? i have needs too, jungkook. i need clean shirts.”) 

((jungkook, a benevolent witchking-god, only shoots hoseok a glare, because he can’t actually know for sure that hoseok was hell-bent on ruining his whole life, as he reasonably suspected but alas could not prove.)) 

“ - it’s been seven days since i humped a hyung that isn’t seokjin-hyung,” jungkook finishes with a flourish, confining himself to jazz hands because a) he is mature and lowkey now and b) relevant. he hopes his other hyungs aren’t upset by the reminder of the hands they no longer get to be held down by and sleep-humped. he also waits for his applause, which is for some reason, not immediately forthcoming. 

no matter. jungkook wasn’t actually finished. this was a fake out. 

“it has also been - drum roll please, taetaehyunghyung - four days since i last had a ‘workplace incident’.” 

again, no applause. jungkook sighs. 

“is ‘workplace incident’ what you’re calling seokjin-hyung’s dick now? because i have to give you points for creativity. you’re definitely not going to call it the wrong name by accident,” taehyung sounds both completely serious and like he’s speaking from experience. jungkook despairs of him. 

“i despair of you,” he tells him. 

“thank you,” taehyung says, smiling and jungkook thinks very seriously about kicking him. 

seokjin reaches over to put his hand on jungkook’s leg, like maybe he can somehow see what he’s thinking. or maybe like he just wants to feel jungkook up. either way, jungkook can’t say he minds where this is going. 

‘hey hyung,’ he thinks as loud as he can, just in case, ‘do you want to come fuck me in a closet y/y?’ 

he looks at seokjin meaningfully, but seokjin isn’t even looking at him, he’s typing something into his phone with his free hand. so, no telepathy sex today, then. okay, disappointing but not life-alteringly terrible. 

onwards and upwards to getting under seokjin some other way. 

“wait,” yoongi says, frowning across the lounge at the two of them like he can’t figure out which one of them tried and almost succeeded in getting his luggage loaded onto the wrong flight. again. jungkook sits up a little straighter and seokjin’s grip gets a little tighter around jungkook’s thigh because as always, as with all good things, they’d done that together. “do you mean - is ‘workplace incident’ code for you trying to get jin-hyung to fuck you in communal and/or public places? do you actually have an exhibitionist kink or are you just that hard fucking pressed to find a place to get it in?” 

as usual, yoongi is the only one jungkook can count on to have his back. and by ‘his back’ he means ‘a healthy and supportive interest in jungkook’s sex life.’ 

“oh, we haven’t fucked yet,” jungkook says easily and the whole room goes still. even the lady refreshing the fruit plate stares over at him like she can’t believe what she’s hearing. and she doesn’t speak korean. jungkook hopes. 

“say what now,” jimin says and jungkook is briefly, eerily reminded of that one horrible conversation they’d had to have when jungkook thought he could get to narnia (seokjin’s dick) by just opening a bunch of random wardrobe doors (stranger’s assholes). 

“what exactly are the two of you doing when you go to bed together every night?” namjoon demands and jungkook kind of feels like he’s on trial. for not having sex with seokjin. truly the most heinous crime of all, if you ask jungkook. 

“we -” seokjin starts to say and part of him wants to sit back and let his hyung handle this, say ‘kick his ass, baby. i got yo flower,’ but another part of him thinks that it’s very important that everything they do and do not do doesn’t become seokjin’s responsibility to explain or handle. 

“we cuddle. and we talk about our feelings. and it’s fucking awesome,” jungkook says, because it is. 

“okay, that’s important and your feelings are valid and should be shared honestly,” yoongi says, pausing to blush when namjoon looks across the room at him like he’s seriously contemplating unhinging his jaw and eating him whole. but like, in a sexy way. “but hasn’t every moment in your life been leading up to getting dicked down by seokjin hyung? because that’s the tragic and complicated tale of jeon jungkook, the way you tell it, at least.” 

and yoongi has kind of got him, there, but. 

“well, you’re not wrong,” jungkook has to admit, “but because all of you thought i was just a desperate little incubus i think it’s important to show seokjin hyung that sex isn’t all that matters to me.” 

that’s both true and not true.

it’s true because sex really isn’t all that matters to jungkook. 

but it’s also not true because - 

“actually, i said we can’t have sex yet,” seokjin says and jungkook turns to look at him, confused. they haven’t talked about what level of discretion they’d aim to observe with the rest of the group so jungkook is both surprised and not actually at all surprised to find that seokjin has decided it’s absolutely none. seokjin also decided that they shouldn’t fuck. again. kind of. not yet, at least. they’re ‘taking their time,’ was how he’d put it and jungkook’s cool with that because he’s had years to practice not jumping seokjin, what’s a few more weeks? merely getting to be next to seokjin and know that he will someday soon get to touch him is enough to have him half feral most days, honestly. maybe seokjin’s decision was just self preservation. 

“because you need to know that he doesn’t just want you for sex?” yoongi sounds baffled by this, “but he’s … jungkook? he’s clearly hopelessly, recklessly and possibly savagely committed to you.” this, coming from the same person who had - albeit very briefly - doubted jungkook’s love for seokjin the loudest is all kinds of awesome. jungkook might make yoongi his underling. if that’s cool with seokjin. 

“no,” seokjin says, shrugging. “mostly just because i want to see how long he can hold out.” 

jungkook is nodding along before he actually registers what seokjin has just said. 

“plus,” seokjin continues, “it’s fun to rile him up.” 

jungkook stares at him, aghast. 

“hyung,” he says, betrayed and also turned on. seokjin could probably turn him over to the cops for a crime he didn’t even commit and jungkook’s first order of business would still be applying for conjugal visits. he is … whatever the much, much worse version of ‘whipped’ is. 

“yes, baby?” seokjin asks, sugar sweet and super close, leaning in until his face is like two inches from jungkook’s, his eyes slitted with a smile so sly that jungkook’s stomach drops. 

“nothing. absolutely nothing, hyung,” jungkook says and then sits on both of his hands so he doesn’t tear his own clothes off and beg seokjin to take him right here, right now instead. 

“good boy,” seokjin says, kissing him on the cheek, far too close to his mouth for jungkook’s liking and much to his pleasure, and then going back to whatever he’s been doing on his phone. 

jungkook’s phone buzzes with a text.

you can decide how hyung fucks you first, if you like. tell me what you want and i’ll decide whether or not i think you deserve it.  
  


jungkook has to ask for an extra blanket on the plane.

he also has to announce, to his shame and regret, that it’s now been 0 days since he’s had a workplace incident. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

dance practices are interesting now, to say the least. 

minjae had apologized to seokjin for kissing him and he’d apologized to both of them for assuming they were in a relationship when they weren’t. he even congratulates them when they tell him that they are, now and has the gall to look genuinely happy for them. it’s not helpful when jungkook really, really wants to be able to hate him for kissing seokjin. 

“but hey, think about this - it’s looking pretty likely that you’ll be the only person to kiss me ever again, now,” seokjin says and it’s dramatic as hell and all kinds of fucking ridiculous and jungkook has to twirl him into his arms and dip him into a kiss right in front of everyone. 

minjae claps for them and jungkook begrudgingly mentally strikes him off his ‘mortal enemies’ list, because he had once upon a time been a hyung that jungkook liked a lot and he can’t just act like anyone who does one thing he doesn’t like is dead to him now. apparently. hoseok and seokjin teamed up for that talk and didn’t even laugh when jungkook made a joke - a joke! - about how they should team up on him in other ways so probably they were serious about it. sucks. 

it’s still not exactly enjoyable, watching other people touch seokjin even when it’s their job to do that. it’s not fun, seeing people look at seokjin like they’d pay him to let them touch him. but sometimes it’s both of those things, when seokjin looks at jungkook and rolls his eyes or when jungkook is the one getting leered at and seokjin tilts his head at him a certain way and pushes his tongue against his bottom lip and jungkook knows he’s thinking about all the ways he wants to touch jungkook, all the places he’s going to put his hands on him later. 

it’s just plain weird when it’s their own bandmates. 

like when yoongi gets drunk and sobs a little into jungkook’s shoulder and thanks him for loving seokjin back. 

“well, who wouldn’t love him?” jungkook honestly has to ask, because the very concept is alien to him. 

“i know, i know,” yoongi slurs cutely, “trust me, i know. we were gonna fold him into our hyung line thing, once he got over you.” 

jungkook very carefully raises one eyebrow at yoongi. at his beloved hyung, who he fiercely respects and adores. his kind hearted, lovely hyung who he absolutely cannot and must not make cry. 

“first of all, hyung,” jungkook says, stressing the word to remind himself of it, “namjoon is part of maknae line and don’t dare forget that again. we’re loaning him out to you and you’re welcome. secondly, one does not simply ‘fold’ seokjin into anything.” because duh, he’s huge. he so very, very much that jungkook is quietly but entirely confident that only he - the reigning maknae kingprince, witchgod - could do the job of loving him properly, as he deserves, true justice. 

it doesn’t surprise him to know that in a world where he doesn’t exist - as cursed a place as that would be - there would be plenty of other people ready and willing to try to be enough for seokjin. it doesn’t even surprise him to know that in this world, people still line up, daring to think they might try. 

it kind of surprises him that his own bandmates have camped out to get the front spots in that line, though. 

only kind of. because he knows them. and he knows seokjin. 

after he’s half carried yoongi home and delivered him into the arms of his fond and waiting boyfriends, jungkook goes back to his own room and finds seokjin already asleep. with taehyung and jimin splayed out on either side of him. 

jungkook feels betrayed, but can’t bring himself to be even a little bit surprised. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

the next morning, he wakes vmin up by pushing them both off the bed and onto the floor. 

he falls back asleep in seokjin’s arms to the sounds of them bickering over who is going to kiss who’s bruises better first. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

the first time seokjin shows up to jungkook’s studio, jungkook doesn’t think much of it. 

it’s not like seokjin has never been here, before. jungkook isn’t as protective of his creative space as yoongi is and he’s not protective of any kind of space he has when it’s seokjin that’s knocking to come in. 

but somewhere around the third time seokjin appears in his doorway and just smiles at him, kisses him on the cheek and settles in on the couch to scroll through his phone or read a book or flip through a script while jungkook works, jungkook thinks about that. 

“did you need something? or are you just killing time?” he spins around in his chair to ask this and goes with it easily when seokjin reaches out to reel him closer. 

“both,” seokjin says, sitting forward to kiss the tip of jungkook’s nose, “and neither.” 

he spins the chair to face the desk again and pushes with his foot until the wheels move, bringing jungkook back to where he started. 

“just want to be where you are,” seokjin says, softer and jungkook grins at his screen. 

he pulls up ‘undone.mp4’ and opens it in ableton. 

he lifts his headphones from around his neck and settles them over his ears, ready to get to work. 

it takes him an hour, to finish it off. 

to complete it. 

he saves it again, anew, as ‘euphoria.mp4’ and sends a copy to both namjoon and yoongi, cc’ing hoseok, jimin, taehyung and seokjin too, just because. 

“hey hyung,” he says, taking his headphones off and turning to seokjin again, “how’s your voice today? feel like lending it to me for a while?” 

seokjin looks back at him, considering. 

“why mine?” 

‘why not?’ jungkook doesn’t say. 

‘because everything i write, i hear in your voice’ he doesn’t say either. 

‘because i’m yours’ is maybe the closest thing to the right answer, but jungkook doesn’t say that either. 

“because you sound the way i feel,” he settles on and seokjin sits up, pockets his phone and holds a hand out. 

“then show me,” he says and jungkook does. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

a couple of days later they’re laying in a nest of blankets they’ve made on the floor of a make-up trailer, trying not to freeze to death between set changes for a music video shoot. 

they’re sharing a pair of airpods and jungkook, scrolling through his phone, pulls up the track. seokjin doesn’t say anything when it ends and starts again. he doesn’t say anything when this happens over and over. jungkook doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of listening to this song now that it’s completed, now that it has all seven of their voices on it. maybe seokjin feels the same way. 

“why did this song upset you so much? that night?” jungkook has to ask. they still haven’t gone over everything, haven’t really dug deeper than the surface of so many moments of misunderstanding, but that’s okay. they’ve got time. they haven’t worked out exactly how and why they missed it in each other, but they trust how they both feel and that’s enough for now. the deep dive will unfold in fits and starts, baby steps and giant leaps over the next months and years, as they all the while stand anchored to what they’re building now, layering over and ever tempering, together. 

seokjin seems to think for a minute. 

“it kind of made me feel better, sometimes, to think about you like you were just this … incredibly sweet, stunningly attractive fuckboy. and i mean that in the kindest way possible,” he says, finally, huffing a laugh. “like … when being in love with you would get really bad. when it hurt more than i thought i could take, it actually made me feel better to hear you say some crude shit about wanting to live in me like i was your human turtle shell.” 

and jungkook - well. jungkook did in fact say just that. several times. 

probably not his finest love declaration. not untrue, though. 

“why?” he has to ask and seokjin laughs again, but it’s nervous now, shaky and unsure. 

“well …” he takes a breath, “because i thought that if you didn’t want to love anyone, then it wasn’t my fault that you didn’t love me.” 

it still amazes jungkook, the lengths they both went to to convince themselves that they weren’t worthy or deserving of one another’s love. the pains they put themselves through. it’s lucky that they have each other now, because no one else could ever understand them enough to protect them both from their masochistic ways. they’re going to be one another’s saving grace. 

“and the song?” jungkook prompts, still confused but aching now too, for seokjin.

“hearing it in namjoon’s studio that day felt like … felt like the whole building was caving in on me. like the whole world was falling on me at once. it’s so obvious how in love you are, listening to this,” at that moment, both of their voices reach a crescendo together in their ears and jungkook smiles, his thumbs rubbing softly, slow over seokjin’s knuckles. “and i was too far gone by then. i’d spent years convincing myself that you didn’t love me. so i thought i was listening to what it sounded like to hear you being in love with someone else. and i guess i didn’t realize just how attached i was to my own insistence that you couldn’t love anyone, until it was gone and i had to face the fact that it was all that had been holding me together.” 

jungkook remembers what seokjin had been like, after. he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the look on his face, when he’d stood in the recording booth and refused to look at jungkook. when he’d pushed past him and spoken to him so coldly, looked at him like he was seeing right through him. 

“i’m sorry that you had to hurt so much to get us here,” jungkook murmurs, pressing his nose to the dip between seokjin’s collarbones, burrowing closer and closer until he feels seokjin press a kiss to the top of his head. 

“and i’m sorry that we got here the way we did,” seokjin adds, because that really hadn’t been their finest moment, either. but - “but i don’t know that we’d ever have gotten here, if everything hadn’t fallen apart as spectacularly as it did,” he says and jungkook agrees, completely. 

“we’re epic, even when we’re a disaster,” jungkook says and seokjin doesn’t disagree. 

he reaches for jungkook’s phone and thumbs the volume up on their song, instead and well, that says all there is to say, really. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

later, when they’re slogging their way through the final shot of the day, they film a scene where they all squash together onto a couch barely big enough to fit half of them. 

it’s a mess. 

there are limbs everywhere and someone trips every time, always someone different, until the director starts to wonder if it’s going to work at all. 

they give it one more shot, try it one more time. 

and this time, no one trips. they’re still a tangle of limbs, a leaning tower of idols, but at the last minute, where it’s always fallen apart before, hoseok’s hands appear out of nowhere to grab at and shove jungkook at the same time. they both end up in seokjin’s lap, jungkook mostly on yoongi and hoseok having to spit a mouthful of jimin’s hair out after the director calls ‘cut’, but it works. they make the shot. 

jungkook holds a hand out to haul hoseok up out of seokjin’s lap and laughs when hoseok uses it to try and climb him, his knees up around jungkook’s ribs and his voice a ringing cackle that makes other people laugh just at hearing it. 

and that, too, is a very good day. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 

and so, this is the way the world ends, jungkook finds. with both a whimper and a bang. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

when jungkook wakes up and rolls over to look at seokjin, he finds an empty bed and a post-it note half stuck to seokjin’s pillow instead. 

‘have a big paper to hand in today, going to the library for the morning to finish it off and then celebrating with classmates after we hand it in. see you tonight, maybe late. love you.’

he does remember seokjin working on something important these last couple weeks, but it’s kind of impossible to distinguish between seokjin’s ‘doing college work’ and ‘playing online games’ faces, given that they are in all ways identical. seokjin only has one concentration face and it’s pretty devastatingly hot so you’ll have to forgive jungkook for not having enough blood flow directed to his brain this week to remember much of what happened, like, at all. 

seokjin was wearing glasses a lot of the time. jungkook has mostly just been holding on for dear life and trying to simply survive. 

so when seokjin messages him that afternoon to say he’s handed in his work and is going out to eat now and not even ten minutes later namjoon knocks on the frame of jungkook’s door to tell him that tomorrow’s schedule has been pushed back until the evening, jungkook looks straight to the heavens and prays both his thanks and a sincere plea for the strength he needs to get through what he’s about to do.

hyung  
  


yes baby?  
  


ugh, jungkook almost feels bad for this. almost.

[image attached]  
  


before i open this  
  


is this what i think it is  
  


because so help me god  
  


.....................  
  


jeon  
  


jungkook  
  


yes hyung? 😇😇😇  
  


it hurts me that i can’t even say i don’t deserve this. i did this to myself.   
  


[image attached]  
  


no hyung i’m doing it to myself because you’re not here :(  
  


i am at dinner. with my classmates. and my ta. i’m trying to be a functioning member of a civilized society, jungkook  
  


i just wanted to congratulate you on being done with your paper, hyung. don’t you want your gift?  
  


[video attached]  
  


JUNGKOOK  
  


that’s not what you called me when i was choking on your cock, hyung  
  


a fucking brat is what you are  
  


what makes you think this is going to work?  
  


do you really think i’m that easy?  
  


i don’t think you’re easy at all hyung  
  


[image attached]  
  


this is actually taking a lot of hard work. don’t you wanna come home and help me?  
  


one more finger and then you stop  
  


like this hyung?  
  


[image attached]  
  


that’s good  
  


am i good, hyung?  
  


idk. we’re about to find out  
  


stop now. and don’t even think about touching yourself again until i get back.  
  


are you coming now?  
  


jungkook hadn’t really meant for seokjin to end his evening early. but if he has to wait much longer he’s going to have to get himself off just to get through the next hour. so.

are you coming soon?  
  


ig you’ll just have to wait and see  
  


jungkook’s head thunks back against the headboard and he doesn’t know for sure that he hasn’t played this entirely wrong. because sure, he knows seokjin wants to fuck him just as badly as he wants to get fucked. but he also knows that seokjin is mean and god help him, he gets off on that probably as much as seokjin does. 

the unknowing of it all is enough to make jungkook start to sweat, so he does what any sane person would do in this situation; he carefully settles a not exactly small butt plug into place (thank you, next day delivery, thank _you_ , foresight of the jungkook of three days ago) and wiggles to make sure it’s comfortable before he heads out to get himself a glass of water, because his thirst is no longer merely metaphorical. 

he’s chugged maybe half of it down when the front door chimes. he has to try very hard not to drop the glass when the front door slams shut. 

jungkook doesn’t know who is or isn’t home right now and seokjin obviously doesn’t either. 

“anyone who is present and awake and not interested in hearing jungkook get fucked incoherent has two minutes to leave,” he calls out and it’s crazy how jungkook can’t even see him yet but he’s starting to get hard anyway. 

“what if we are interested in that?” someone calls back just as seokjin comes into view, coat still on and his face cold weather flushed but maybe another kind of flushed too. he shouldn’t have been able to get back here as quick as he did. he’d have to have left … when jungkook first messaged him. 

“get out, taehyung,” seokjin calls back, looking at jungkook as he unknots the scarf from around his neck, throwing it to the floor and going for his coat. he drops that to the floor too and then he’s crossing the kitchen in quick, big strides, not stopping until he’s got jungkook backed up against the sink. 

he keeps him there, caging him in and just looking at him, not doing a fucking thing, until they hear the hasty commotion of shoes being put on, coats being pulled from hangers, wallets and keys being rifled for. 

“hyung,” jungkook says, quiet and yearning already because jesus fuck he wants this so bad. seokjin is right up against him, all over him and jungkook is beyond gone for him. 

the front door slams again and seokjin’s hand goes to the glass still in jungkook’s hand, their fingers overlapping when he takes it from him and sets it down on the counter behind him. his eyes haven’t left jungkook’s once. he’s looking at him like he’s about to take him apart. jungkook whimpers. seokjin hasn’t even touched him yet and jungkook _whimpers_. 

“you didn’t ask hyung for anything specific,” seokjin reminds him. and true, jungkook just doesn’t have the brain capacity to think about how he wants seokjin to fuck him, if he has to narrow it down to only one. that’s namjoon level stuff and jungkook simply does not have the clearance. he’ll take whatever he can get. he wants it all. “so i decided for you.” 

seokjin takes jungkook’s wrist in his hand and pulls him away from the counter, tugs him along after him as he leads them to their bedroom. he closes and locks their bedroom door behind them and then he pushes jungkook up against the back of it. he takes his face in both of his hands. 

“i thought about it all the way home,” seokjin says, leaning in to lick at jungkook’s mouth but not kissing him properly. “i thought about it long before tonight, actually, but i decided because you reminded me of your little exhibionist streak, sending me those pictures when anyone could look over my shoulder and see them. that ridiculous fucking fantasy you have of someone fucking you at the front door.” 

“not someone,” jungkook says, choking the words out because it’s important that seokjin knows that, jungkook doesn’t know how he doesn’t already know that, “you, hyung. it was you i wanted. it’s always you i want.” 

seokjin has the audacity to look like he’s taken aback by this. 

“you really think i got off on thinking about some random faceless person fucking me like that?” jungkook pushes him back gently, follows after him until seokjin’s legs hit the side of the bed and he has to sit down, jungkook dropping to his knees in front of him. “it’s always you. for years now, it’s only been you, every single time.” 

like this, below seokjin, jungkook feels both small and infinite. too powerful and completely powerless at once. he wants to be completely at seokjin’s mercy, but he only is because seokjin trusts him enough to let him get this close. 

“same,” seokjin says, “it’s always you for me, too. you, every single way imaginable.” 

his fingers trailing slowly up the side of jungkook’s neck and jungkook wonders if he’s thinking about the last time they were like this. he wonders if seokjin is thinking about what it had felt like when he’d fucked jungkook’s throat. he hopes seokjin’s going to do it again, but when he leans in and tries to push his face into seokjin’s lap, seokjin holds him back. he reaches out with both hands to take jungkook’s face in his palms and just look at him, like that. 

“the things i’ve thought about doing to you, jungkook…” he says and it’s reverent. it’s deliberate and weighty and jungkook wants to tie himself to it like an anchor. 

“so do them, hyung,” he says, letting his eyes slip shut and lifting his chin. offering himself up. “do them all.” 

seokjin leans in and kisses him, a brutal, biting, claiming kiss that leaves them both panting. 

“i’m going to fuck you on the counter in the bathroom,” seokjin tells him, standing up and going for his own belt, tugging it out of the loops of his jeans and then reaching for jungkook, pulling him up onto his feet. “i’m going to fuck you right there in front of the mirror and let you see what you look like when you’re getting what you want, because you’re a fucking vision like that, jungkook.” 

it barely takes a second for them both to get stripped down, four hands pulling jungkook’s hoodie up and over his head, four hands meeting in the middle of the buttons that line seokjin’s shirt. 

jungkook almost trips on his own feet as seokjin herds him into their bathroom. he chokes on his own tongue when seokjin pushes him to the countertop and then steps up behind him, holding him there with hands that aren’t gentle, are not patient or careful. 

seokjin is the one that freezes then, though, when he kicks jungkook’s feet apart and finds what’s waiting for him. 

“you -” he says, staring seemingly disbelievingly at where the plug peeks out from between jungkook’s cheeks, when seokjin spreads them. his fingers are curled tight into jungkook’s hips, just his thumbs holding him open and his reflection in the mirror, his stupidly attractive face struck dumb at what he’s seeing makes jungkook rut into the counter, painful but something, at least. “you plugged yourself up for me?” 

“didn’t wanna waste time,” jungkook says, still transfixed by how seokjin looks, so nakedly wanting and for him, for jungkook. they’ve got forever to do this slow and sweet, drawn out and saccharine. that’s not what jungkook wants, this time. “want it fast, hyung. want it hard.” 

he shifts in place, tries to grind back into seokjin and that seems to shake him out of his reverie. 

“you’ll take it however i give it to you,” seokjin murmurs, low and deadly. he meets jungkook’s eyes in the mirror and jungkook goes still. “won’t you, 'guk-ah?” 

“yes, hyung,” jungkook says, automatic. “please, hyung.” 

“please what?” seokjin asks, hooking his chin over jungkook’s shoulder and running his hands up jungkook’s stomach, tracing torturously slow up over the line of his abs, cupping his pecs and pinching at his nipples. jungkook bites down on his bottom lip until he tastes blood. 

“please fuck me, hyung. please. want it so bad,” jungkook tilts his head back when seokjin gets a hand around his throat, puts his mouth to jungkook’s jaw. his teeth to the bone. 

“it’s crazy, when i think about it,” seokjin murmurs, sounds so fucking idle and calm about it when jungkook’s fighting not to let his eyes roll back up into his head. seokjin has his dick pressed between jungkook’s cheeks, the lube jungkook was too lazy to properly clean up making the slide so easy, so fucking wet. “i was so stupid to think you were just a little slut that wanted to get fucked, when you’re so clearly just a slut for me.” 

jungkook gives up. he fought a good fight. he tried so hard and got so far but in the end his eyes still end up in his own skull. his throat works around nothing. a swallow of empty air that makes it no easier to breathe. 

“everyone can see it, you know,” seokjin says, his other hand going to jungkook’s cock, gripping him tight. he dips his hand between jungkook’s legs and tugs the plug out, holds jungkook’s hole open around his fingers until some of the lube jungkook had fingered into himself dribbles out into his palm and then strokes it up over jungkook’s shaft. “anytime literally anyone is in a room with us both, they can tell that you’re fucking desperate for it. but only if it’s me that’s going to give it to you, right?” 

“yes, hyung,” jungkook nods desperately, “oh god, please.” 

“still a slut even when you know you’re going to get what you want, huh? that’s kind of sweet, jungkook. hyung loves you like this, you know.” 

he pulls back a bit, the loss of the heat of his chest making a shiver ripple across jungkook’s back. seokjin’s hands disappear too and jungkook whines, but then seokjin is holding him open and tapping the head of his cock against jungkook’s hole and jungkook is shivering for a different reason entirely. 

“are you gonna let me fuck you raw, 'guk-ah? do you want hyung’s come in you?” 

they’ve talked about this already. jungkook has talked about it at length, these last few weeks, in fact. so it shouldn’t shock jungkook. there’s no reason for it to make his breath lock up in his chest. but it does. 

jungkook nods, frantic and unco-ordinated. surprised by his own reaction. 

“yes please, hyung,” he says and seokjin laughs at him. 

“such a surprise. the slut wants his greedy little hole pumped full of his hyung’s come. i don’t know why i even bothered to ask, honestly.” 

seokjin crouches down for a second, his hand sliding down the back of jungkook’s thigh until he can hook it and lift it up onto the counter, jungkook half pressed up against it, half leaning up over it, now. 

“you’re beautiful like this, guk,” seokjin says, his hands all over jungkook, hot on the inside of his thighs, sweeping syrupy slow up over his ribs like he’s got all the time in the world. “you’re gorgeous when you’re desperate for my cock. but then again,” he says, holding the head of his cock to jungkook’s empty, dripping hole and finally, finally starting to push inside. “that’s all the time, isn’t it?” 

“yes,” jungkook says, a response to both what seokjin is saying and doing to him. seokjin bands one arm tight and low around jungkook’s hips, holding him still until every inch of his cock is inside jungkook. and then he’s leaning in close again, his chest pressed right to jungkook’s back and his hand back on jungkook’s throat. jungkook can only see his eyes over his own shoulder in the mirror, watches seokjin look down at his cock working between jungkook’s legs. it’s so hot jungkook wants to cry, but he doesn’t have what he’d need to, just breathing and staying completely, perfectly still is taking everything he’s got. 

seokjin’s cock is thick, in him. it’s big but it feels huge in his ass, so much bigger than it had felt even when he’d been struggling to fit his own sobs in his mouth alongside it. 

jungkook’s legs are shaking already but from the force of seokjin’s thrusts jungkook can tell he could take jungkook’s weight if he needed him to. he knows seokjin could hold him up like this and fuck him for however long he wanted to and that makes jungkook harder, somehow. his dick is bobbing in front of him, throbbing untouched now that seokjin has him held up over the sink, his balls sticking wetly to the countertop depending on how hard seokjin decides to hold him down to make him take his thrusts and it’s cold, it’s an extra layer of sensation added to a system already entirely overloaded and jungkook can only grit his teeth and try not to come. 

“you struggling, baby?” seokjin asks, bringing his chin back over jungkook’s chin so he can peer at him through the mirror. “this too much for you?” 

he’s so fucking mean. he’s so hot and he’s so perfectly, sharply mean and jungkook loves him. jungkook loves every single thing about him but he’s newly infatuated, he finds, with the slick, brutal slide of his cock when he gives it to jungkook like this. 

“no. ‘s perfect, hyung,” jungkook pants, his certainty letting seokjin grip his throat a little tighter, not constricting his airway but making him feel it, “love this. love you.” 

“i love you too, 'guk-ah,” seokjin grins at him, all teeth. the hand he has on jungkook’s hip becomes a claw, his fingernails digging in to hold jungkook in place because he’s thrusting hard enough to fuck him up onto the counter now, if he wasn’t holding jungkook down. “i love your slutty ass. love your tight little abs and your big, hard thighs and how all you want is to be good and bend over for me.” 

he’s grunting on every other thrust now, slowing down his strokes so that when he’s all the way inside jungkook he waits it out for a beat, grinds in deep and then pulls jungkook’s hips down onto him even further. 

“jerk yourself off, guk,” he says, licking a bead of sweat off the side of jungkook’s face. “wanna watch you come on my cock but i don’t wanna take my hands off you. wanna feel you come for me.” 

and if jungkook really thought about that, just concentrated on what seokjin is saying for even a second he could probably come without touching himself at all. but seokjin has fucked him well and truly stupid. seokjin has fucked him all the way out of his mind so it’s pure instinct that has him doing whatever seokjin tells him to do. 

he gasps when he gets a hand around himself. he jolts forward into it and seokjin just follows him, stays pressed up as close as he can get to him but bends him forward until jungkook has to reach out with his free hand and hold himself up with his sweaty hand pressed to the mirror. the angle change means that when seokjin pushes all the way back in again, he nails jungkook’s prostate. 

jungkook shouts and shakes and seokjin does it again and again and again until jungkook comes, his cock dribbling all over his own knuckles and into the sink below. 

“oh you’re so pretty like this,” seokjin breathes, sounding winded, “feel so good, guk,” he swears and then he’s pushing in deep, his cock jerking in jungkook and everything getting hotter and wetter and just that little bit more overwhelming for jungkook. his arm gives out and he has to press his face to the mirror, cheek to the cool surface of it so he can gasp for breath he wonders if he’ll ever get back. 

“fuck,” seokjin says, collapsing over jungkook’s back and jungkook can only agree by reaching back over his shoulder and patting seokjin on the shoulder. 

jungkook wants to live like this; sweaty and spent with seokjin on him and in him and all over him, every single way he can be. 

“how married to your career as an idol are you?” seokjin asks, “because i’ve got enough money to support us both, you know. i’ll treat you so good, babe. do you wanna be my trophy wife? i feel like ‘trophy husband’ just doesn’t make it clear how blisteringly hot you are and i want that recognition for you. you deserve it.” 

jungkook laughs but it turns into a gasp when seokjin starts to pull out of him. he’s so achingly, terribly empty for a second, but then seokjin’s fingers are there, filling him up again so the come and lube that’s trying to drip out of him doesn’t get all over the floor. 

it’s a quick but awkward shuffle into the shower, where jungkook tries valiantly not to get hard again when seokjin fingers his own come out of him, but fails spectacularly and is rewarded for his misdeeds with a blow job that makes his vision black out for a second. 

“you can fuck me, if you want,” seokjin offers easily and jungkook’s eyebrows shoot up. “i mean, not now. well, actually yeah now if you want. but also any other time you want. your ass is good enough for me to propose on first contact but i don’t need exclusive rights. plus, your dick is pretty fucking compelling too.” 

jungkook takes a moment to think about it, because he’s honestly never considered fucking seokjin before. not seriously. but as hard as he looks for any objections he may have, he is unsurprised to find that he’s into the idea of doing pretty much everything to seokjin. what can he say, he’s easy. in every sense of the word, for seokjin. and he tells him as much. 

seokjin, in response, pushes jungkook up against the sink again, facing him this time and gets himself off again by not letting jungkook touch him no matter how hard he begs, just looking at the reflection of his hand digging into jungkook’s shoulder blade and listening to jungkook whine and plead. 

by the time they collapse into bed, jungkook feels wrung out in a way that no dance practice has ever been able to achieve for him. 

it’s awesome. 

so awesome, in fact that jungkook actually devotes a couple minutes to seriously considering seokjin’s offer. ultimately he decides that the trophy wife life is not for him, not when he can be both seokjin’s trophy wife on the low and a global superstar highkey. either would be enough for him, for sure, but jungkook has never been one to settle for ‘good enough,’ not when ‘the best’ was still on the table and only unattainable for anyone who wasn’t him. 

he turns to seokjin who is sacked out next to him on his back and snuggles in close until he’s wrapped all up over seokjin’s side. 

“i’ve thought about it,” he says and seokjin hums to show him he’s listening, “and while i would like to be your wife, i’m going to keep helping you change the world with our music.” 

seokjin nods, his eyes still closed. 

“i respect your decision. being adored by millions is a pretty impossible feat to outbid, so i accept my defeat the way i do everything else - begrudgingly but gracefully,” he says and jungkook giggles into his neck. 

“oh, no hyung,” he says and seokjin turns to look at him, “i didn’t mean i don’t want to be your trophy wife because i want to be an idol instead. i meant i’m going to do both.” 

seokjin looks at him for a second, just looks at him and then he sits up and rolls over on top of him, his hands going up under jungkook’s shirt like they’re drawn there by magnetic force. 

“don’t joke about marrying me, jeon jungkook,” he says, half-heartedly trying to tickle jungkook but mostly just laying on him and laughing instead, “because i’ll do it. i’ll marry the fuck out of you and you’ll like it, you little brat.” 

“of course i would, hyung,” jungkook says and he’s still smiling when seokjin leans down to kiss him. 

they fall asleep with their mouths still pressed together, seokjin lying halfway on top of jungkook and jungkook completely, blissfully happy about that. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

when jungkook walks in, seokjin looks up and smiles at him, soft and fond before he goes right back to whatever he’s explaining to taehyung. 

the tone of his voice is enough to make jungkook strain to hear what they’re saying, because seokjin is being patient and careful and it’s been forever since jungkook saw or heard him that way. mostly with jungkook he’s either infatuated, insatiable or both. jungkook’s life is a dream, has he mentioned? 

“... just a little bit,” taehyung is saying, leaning so far out of his chair that he’d probably fall right out of it if the stylist noona wasn’t standing on the base of it to keep him upright. “just a tiny little bit. a morsel, hyung, please. just give us like … half an hour. twenty minutes! please?” 

“taehyung, i love you,” seokjin says plainly, heartfeltly, “but i’m looking out for you, here. this is for your own good. you wouldn’t survive it, i promise you. five minutes alone with him would kill you.” 

jungkook tilts his head and narrows his eyes but neither of them are looking at him. 

seokjin is reading over some lyrics that jungkook had given him that morning and taehyung is rubbing his hands together, pouting at seokjin. 

“not even for my birthday?” 

“not even if your life depended on it, tae,” seokjin says, but corrects himself, “well, maybe if your life depended on it. if you’re ever going to actually die if you don’t get to fuck jungkook then come back to me about this, but otherwise please consider this matter concluded and stop fucking begging, it’s getting embarrassing.” 

“ugh, fine, i hate you,” taehyung says, still pouting. 

“i’ll cry about that when i’m balls deep in jungkook later on, i’m sure,” seokjin says mildly and taehyung gasps like he’s been slapped. and then starts rubbing his hands together again. 

“can’t you just let us watch? or take pictures for us? please, hyung. _please_.” 

disturbingly, seokjin actually looks like he’s thinking about it and jungkook has to wonder if he has (mostly) accidentally conditioned seokjin’s responses to the phrase ‘please hyung.’ 

“i’ll ask jungkook if he wants to share some of his art with you, but only because he could have a whole side career as an erotic photographer and it makes me sad that more people can’t appreciate his work. it’s entirely up to him, though, so leave me alone before i tell him not to give you anything.” 

taehyung agrees quickly and happily and sits back into his chair properly, smiling at the stylist noona who definitely is due a raise right about now, jungkook realizes. 

even as jungkook is thinking this, taehyung tilts wildly into seokjin’s side again and her comb clatters to the floor. 

“hey hyung, i accept that we can’t fuck jungkook, but where do you stand on the issue?” he asks, conspiratorally, like bargaining to get to fuck jungkook is just about anyone’s business but asking to fuck seokjin is special, somehow. 

seokjin, to jungkook’s horror, looks at taehyung like he has noticed this disparity too. and is pleased by it. that fucker. 

“you want to fuck hyung? both of you?” seokjin is blushing and jungkook has had enough of this, he decides. 

taehyung screams the whole way down the corridor, hands slapping futilely at jungkook’s back when jungkook swings him up over his shoulder and carries him away. 

he’s still screaming when jungkook dumps him unceremoniously into jimin’s lap but he’s realized he can put both his hands in jungkook’s back pockets by then, so his screaming has taken on a different tack entirely. 

“do something about him,” jungkook tells jimin, leaving it up to him exactly what it is that he does do, because jimin’s imagination is much worse than his own. 

all jimin does, however, is let taehyung huddle in his lap and pat his head commiseratingly. 

and when jungkook gets back to the waiting room, namjoon has taken taehyung’s seat and is leaning over to look at the notebook seokjin is sharing with him. 

it’s not easy, both being and dating the most fuckable member of bangtan, but jungkook, god bless and keep him, soldiers ever on. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

the sun is low, close to setting and bursting in an endless, seamless bloom of colour across the sky, peeking just barely over the top row of seats and the army bombs waving high. 

jungkook has spent the better part of two hours singing his heart out into the air tonight and he would do it for five more, if he could. 

he’s sweaty and grinning when he skips across the stage to grab a bottle of water and he doesn’t even know whose arm is slung around his neck when he straightens back up to chug it, but it doesn’t matter much, either way. 

“this next one is called ‘euphoria’ and you all know the words to it, right?” namjoon yells into his mic and a sea of voices answer him. 

it’s not baseless confidence or mere optimism. army sent this song to the top of the charts and kept it there for weeks. the most rt’d tweet about it says ‘spring day walked so euphoria could run,’ and there are hundreds of memes, a bunch of variations that show different depictions of the melon chart crying. 

the strings come in first, slow and sweeping and with them, jungkook’s six best friends come to seek him out, drawn to him from every corner of a sprawling stage. 

their voices wind together, seven individual and distinct sounds wielded for one purpose; woven together to say just one thing. 

it’s seokjin’s arm that’s around jungkook’s shoulders and it’s jimin taking jungkook’s hand and hoseok linking his arm with jungkook’s. it’s yoongi leaning in over seokjin to ruffle jungkook’s hair and it’s namjoon poking his finger into jungkook’s cheek and taehyung darting in to try and lick the side of jungkook’s face. 

it’s all seven of them, together, bathed in bright lights in front of their family, their friends, doing what they were meant to do, the way they want to do it. 

with the people they love. for the people they love. 

it’s _them_

and it is everything. 

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
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_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/  
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (slight canon divergence here to include all seven of them on 'euphoria' and have it be a track that jk produced. largely because that'd be an improvement on the already canon reality, imho) 
> 
> thank you sincerely for reading if you made it all the way to the end of this. you're a superstar and i appreciate your time. ♥


End file.
